Evil Dead

The Evil Dead is one of horror’s most durable and most imitated franchises, born in 1981 when a young Sam Raimi took a tiny budget, a cabin in the Tennessee woods, and his friend Bruce Campbell, and turned them into a movie that has refused to die for over four decades. What started as a scrappy low-budget shocker grew into a saga spanning six films, a Starz television series, a string of video games, decades of comics, and a level of cultural reach most blockbusters never touch. In 2026 the franchise is somehow busier than ever, with Evil Dead Burn arriving in theaters and a seventh film already in production.

The premise has stayed simple across every entry. People find the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, the Book of the Dead, they read from it or hear its passages, and they unleash an ancient Kandarian evil that possesses the living and turns them into Deadites. From there it is survival, dismemberment, and a whole lot of blood. The tone has swung wildly between pure terror and slapstick horror-comedy over the years, and that flexibility is a big part of why the series never wore out.

The Evil Dead Movies in Order

The film series is unusual because it keeps reinventing itself rather than running one continuous story. Here is how the six theatrical films line up.

The Evil Dead (1981)

Sam Raimi’s debut feature sends five college students to a remote cabin where they find the Book of the Dead and a tape recorder containing its incantations. Playing the tape wakes the evil in the woods, and the group is picked off one by one as they turn into Deadites. Bruce Campbell stars as Ash Williams, the character who would become the face of the entire franchise. The film is raw, relentless, and famous for Raimi’s kinetic camerawork, including the unstoppable demon point-of-view shots racing through the forest.

Evil Dead II (1987)

Equal parts sequel and soft remake, Evil Dead II opens by recapping the first film before stranding Ash at the cabin all over again. This is where the series found its signature blend of horror and comedy. Ash’s hand becomes possessed and he saws it off, replacing it with a chainsaw, and Campbell’s physical performance turns slapstick into something genuinely unhinged. The line “Groovy” is born here, and the movie ends with Ash sucked through a portal into the distant past.

Army of Darkness (1992)

The third film drops Ash into 1300 AD and leans fully into fantasy adventure and comedy. Armed with his chainsaw hand and his sawed-off shotgun, the boomstick, Ash has to retrieve the Necronomicon to get home while battling an army of the dead. This is the entry that gave the world “Hail to the king, baby” and “This is my boomstick,” and it cemented Ash as a wisecracking pop culture icon rather than just a horror survivor.

Evil Dead (2013)

Fede Álvarez rebooted the series with a darker, more serious tone and almost no comedy. Jane Levy stars as Mia, a young woman whose friends take her to a cabin to help her quit drugs, only for the Book of the Dead to turn the intervention into a nightmare. The film earned a reputation as one of the most brutal mainstream horror movies of its era, and a post-credits scene gives Bruce Campbell a quick “Groovy” cameo to reassure longtime fans the old Ash was not forgotten.

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Lee Cronin moved the carnage out of the woods and into a crumbling Los Angeles apartment building. The story follows estranged sisters Beth and Ellie, whose family is torn apart when the Necronomicon is found in a vault beneath the building and Ellie is possessed, becoming a monstrous Deadite mother hunting her own children. The change of setting proved the formula works far from any cabin, and the film became a box office hit that reignited the whole franchise.

Evil Dead Burn (2026)

The sixth film, directed by French filmmaker Sébastien Vani?ek from a screenplay he co-wrote with Florent Bernard, arrives in theaters on July 10, 2026. Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert produce, with Bruce Campbell and Lee Cronin serving as executive producers. Raimi handed Vani?ek the job after being impressed by his debut horror film Infested. Burn is a standalone story disconnected from the previous films, following a grieving widow who seeks comfort with her in-laws at a secluded family home, only for the gathering to become a family reunion from hell as the relatives turn into Deadites one by one. Warner Bros. and New Line are behind it, with Sony handling international release.

The franchise is not stopping there. A seventh mainline film, Evil Dead Wrath, written and directed by Francis Galluppi, began filming in Auckland in early 2026 and is scheduled to reach theaters in April 2028.

Ash Williams, the Necronomicon, and the Deadites

Ash Williams is the spine of the whole series, even in the films he does not appear in. He starts as an ordinary, cowardly guy and is slowly forged into a chainsaw-handed, shotgun-toting demon slayer with a one-liner for every situation. Bruce Campbell’s performance, all square jaw and rubber-faced panic, is one of the great cult-hero turns in horror, and the character’s catchphrases have outlived plenty of bigger franchises.

The engine driving every story is the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, the Book of the Dead, bound in human flesh and inked in blood. It contains the passages that summon the Kandarian demon, the malevolent force that sweeps through the woods and possesses anyone it catches. The possessed become Deadites, twisted and cackling versions of the people they used to be, and stopping them usually means dismemberment, fire, or a trip back to whatever hell they crawled out of. That simple mythology gives every entry a clean setup and endless room to escalate.

Ash vs Evil Dead and the TV Series

In 2015, Starz brought the series to television with Ash vs Evil Dead, with Bruce Campbell returning as a much older, much lazier Ash decades after the original films. Working a dead-end retail job, he is forced back into demon-fighting when the Deadites return, this time with two sidekicks, Pablo and Kelly, and the recurring presence of Ruby, played by Lucy Lawless. The show ran for three seasons through 2018 and fully embraced the gory, comedic spirit of Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness. It remains the only screen project to bring an aged-up Ash back as the lead, and for fans it served as the proper continuation of Campbell’s run with the character.

Evil Dead Games

Evil Dead has a long and uneven history in gaming. Early titles like Evil Dead: Hail to the King in 2000, Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick in 2003, and Evil Dead: Regeneration in 2005 let players step into Ash’s boots across survival horror and action genres with mixed results. The most ambitious attempt came in 2022 with Evil Dead: The Game from Saber Interactive, an asymmetrical multiplayer game that pitted a team of survivors, including multiple versions of Ash, against a player-controlled Kandarian demon.

It launched to real enthusiasm, but it landed in a genre that has been brutal to almost everyone who is not the market leader. Support wound down within a couple of years and the game was eventually pulled from sale. The studios behind these projects ran into the same wall that has buried most challengers in the space, a story I dug into more in the Dead by Daylight franchise page, where the asymmetrical horror graveyard is laid out in full.

Sam Raimi and the Evil Dead Legacy

It is hard to overstate how much Evil Dead shaped both its creator and the genre. The frantic, inventive camerawork Raimi developed on a shoestring became his signature, and he carried that same energy into the original Spider-Man trilogy, which turned him into one of the biggest blockbuster directors of the 2000s. The Oldsmobile Delta 88 that appears in the first Evil Dead became his lucky charm, showing up in nearly every film he has made since.

The franchise’s influence runs deep through horror, from the cabin-in-the-woods template it helped define to the gleeful mixing of scares and laughs that countless films have tried to copy. Few horror series can claim a four-decade run with this little drop-off in quality or relevance, and with Evil Dead Burn in theaters and Evil Dead Wrath already filming, the Deadites show no sign of staying dead. For a series built entirely on things that refuse to die, that feels exactly right.