Sam Raimi Reveals a Few EVIL DEAD 4 Story Concepts That Never Quite Clicked
Before Ash Vs. Evil Dead bloodily exploded on Starz, Sam Raimi was trying to develop a fourth Evil Dead film for years, which is technically something that could still eventually happen. It will just end up being very different from every other story idea that they had already come up with.
I’m fine with the fact that an Evil Dead 4 film hasn’t happened yet. The TV series has been freakin’ awesome, and I couldn’t have asked for anything more entertaining. But Raimi was really trying to crack a story for a fourth film, but it just never clicked.
ScreenRant recently got their hands on a commentary track for the upcoming Blu-ray for the first season of Ash Vs. Evil Dead. In that commentary, Raimi talks about working on Evil Dead 4 and reveals that they were developing several different versions. He explains:
“Ivan and I wrote a lot of different versions of Evil Dead as a feature in the years after Army of Darkness. We’d get 20 pages into one draft and realize it was not good, do another five pages a different direction.”
He even goes on to reveal what some of these ideas were! One of them followed Bruce Campbell as a documentary filmmaker. Raimi goes into some detail saying:
“Bruce is a documentary filmmaker I remember one of them was, capturing his own journey through life. I remember we wrote one version; we started to write one version of Evil Dead 4…” Brother Ivan chimes in: “Bruce travels cross country to sell his documentary in a car to explain the importance of his story being told.” Sam continues: “No one thought it was a very important story except him.”
That’s an interesting option, and I can see why they ditched it. Another one of the ideas is one that we’ve already shared before. This was a wonderfully insane concept that I wish they would have stuck with. The story followed two versions of Ash in different timelines. It combined the two separate endings that were shot for Army of Darkness. One was set in the future of a post-apocalyptic universe, which was an ending that the UK audiences saw, and the other was set in the present day with Bruce returning to S-Mart, which is what the U.S. audiences saw. The director says:
“So we wrote an Evil Dead 4 that followed both realities. We were going to be following two Bruces – one in the future and simultaneously crosscutting to Bruce here in the present. And we realized, we have really lost our mind now and we must stop.”
They shouldn’t have stopped, though! They should have followed through with that shit! That could have been an awesome film! There was another idea that never saw the light of day that Campbell called "Ash vs. the Machines." It was described as a big-budget film with a Terminator-esque story. Raimi ditched it, though, because he didn’t think there would “be enough money for the big production we had planned.”
It’s pretty cool to learn about some of the other story ideas for Evil Dead 4. It was obviously a hard nut for Raimi to crack. Luckily, they ended up getting this badass, blood-crazed series off the ground, and I’m excited to see where it all leads! Maybe one day Raimi will crack the story for Evil Dead 4, but until then, I’m just going to enjoy the hell out of Ash Vs. Evil Dead.