We’ve talked about childhood trauma a few times on Grave Tone, but this episode hits a little different. For this episode, Meaghan and Arthur welcome a very special guest: Eleazar, host of the Nightmare Echoes podcast, who brings his own personal horror history to the table.
The film on the chopping block is Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead (1981) and its 1987 sequel Evil Dead II, and the conversation goes way deeper than just “was it scary.” We get into the film’s chaotic production, the legal nightmare that basically created the sequel, the expanding lore of the Necronomicon, and where the franchise is headed in 2026. Grab something to hold onto.
How the Evil Dead Franchise Was Born (and Almost Broken by Rights Issues)
Before there was a franchise, there was a short film. Meaghan kicks things off by tracing the Evil Dead story back to Within the Woods (1978), a half-hour proof-of-concept that Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and producer Rob Tapert put together to attract investors. It worked. The money came in, and The Evil Dead hit screens in 1981.
What happened next is where it gets messy. When Raimi and his collaborators went to make a sequel, they discovered that multiple studios held the rights to the original film’s footage. They couldn’t legally use any of it.
So instead of a traditional continuation, they compressed the events of the first film into roughly the opening ten to fifteen minutes of Evil Dead II, swapping some characters out and quietly changing the premise. In this version, it’s just Ash Williams and his girlfriend Linda heading to the cabin alone, which also gave rise to a running fan theory that they were never meant to be there at all and that some demonic force was pulling Ash back.
The rights complications kept compounding. By the time Army of Darkness (1992) came around, the team couldn’t secure the rights to Evil Dead II either, so Linda was recast again with a different actress.
Then the TV series Ash vs. Evil Dead launched without the rights to Army of Darkness, meaning that the entire storyline was quietly written out of the show’s universe. Eleazar summarizes the chaos perfectly:
They couldn’t get the rights to Army of Darkness, only part one and two, so they pretended like that storyline didn’t exist.
Meaghan adds that the show was actually pretty self-aware about all of it, leaning into the franchise’s tangled continuity as a running joke rather than trying to cover it up.
Eleazar’s Childhood Trauma: VHS Tapes, a Friend Named Edward, and the Tree Scene
Here’s the part of the episode that’s honestly hard to forget. Eleazar shares that his entry point into the Evil Dead films wasn’t the first one. He saw Army of Darkness at twelve, told his friends he’d seen the originals (he had not), and then had to go back and actually watch them. That decision left a mark.
He found the first films through a childhood friend named Edward, a kid who had access to a massive VHS collection of horror films that his father had accumulated. Edward had everything. Nightmare on Elm Street, Evil Dead, all of it. Sitting in that house at twelve years old and watching The Evil Dead was, by Eleazar’s account, genuinely traumatic.
Two things hit him hardest. First, the infamous tree assault scene, which Eleazar traces directly back to producer Rob Tapert. Tapert pushed for it to be included, and Raimi has since said he regrets going that far. Even more striking is that when the 2013 remake was being developed, Tapert reportedly pulled the new director aside and insisted the scene had to stay in. It wasn’t even in the original script for the remake, and the actress who filmed it reportedly didn’t know it was coming until they were on set.
Second, Eleazar was raised in a deeply religious household, and demons are not just movie monsters for him. They carry a specific weight.
Anytime you bring demons into the equation, I’m a little bit more scared.
He explains. What really lodges in his brain is Linda’s laugh, the nonstop, mocking cackle that runs through the first film while Ash is completely powerless to do anything about it. Even now, as an adult, it still gets to him.
There’s a funny coda to all of this. Eleazar was watching the first film again with his son in a brand-new house, and right as Cheryl says “it’s not going to let us go” repeatedly, they went to leave the room and the doorknob came off in their hands. His son wanted snacks. The demons had other plans.
The Production Hell Behind the Camera
The conversation spends real time on how these films were physically made, and it’s genuinely wild. On the first film, the cast and crew were essentially living at the filming location, a remote cabin in Tennessee, because their rented housing had been converted into a brothel (no, really), and they had no other option.
Power tools were being stolen off the set by passersby. The fireplace was the only heat source. Raimi was spotted shivering outside until someone dragged him closer to the fire. Campbell injured his ankle running down a hill, and Raimi repeatedly poked the injury with a stick to get authentic reactions from him on camera.
By the time Evil Dead II came around, the budget was higher, but the shoot wasn’t easier. The temperature had swung to the opposite extreme: blazing heat instead of freezing cold.
This is where Ted Raimi, Sam’s younger brother, had to wear a full latex suit for his creature role. Arthur brings up the suit specifically, noting that crew members had to actually dump buckets of sweat out of it between takes. Eleazar confirms that in one shot, when Ted Raimi’s character leans his head over, sweat visibly pours out of one of the holes in the costume. “That’s not an effect,” he says. “That is just how hot it was.“
Meaghan notes that Ted Raimi keeps coming back to his brother’s productions despite this, which she finds equal parts admirable and baffling.
Your little brother and you’re like, go do this. I’ll give you five dollars.
Lore, the Necronomicon, and a Franchise That Keeps Expanding
One of the more satisfying threads in this episode is the conversation about how the Necronomicon, the flesh-bound Book of the Dead that kicks off the whole chain of events, evolves across the series. In the first film, it’s established but relatively simple.
By the second film, there are additional pages, more illustrations, a richer backstory, and the introduction of an ancient prophecy that includes what appears to be a drawing of Ash himself, chainsaw hand and all, standing in medieval times. He doesn’t notice the drawing. Of course he doesn’t.
Eleazar points out that the three-book situation in Army of Darkness adds another layer. Two of the three books are supposed to be fakes, but Ash says the incantation (“Klaatu barada nikto,” sort of) before grabbing the wrong one, which leads to a fan theory that Sam Raimi believes multiple copies of the Necronomicon exist in this universe. Because Ash may have legitimately activated all three, the book looking slightly different in each film isn’t a continuity error. It might just be canon.
Meaghan connects this directly to Evil Dead Rise (2023), where the deadites are unleashed through vinyl records rather than a tape or the book itself, and where Bruce Campbell’s voice can reportedly be heard as an unnamed character desperately trying to warn people not to proceed.
The theory is that Ash is still out there, time-jumping through history, attempting to stop deadite outbreaks before they happen. Arthur points out that Ash is in many ways responsible for starting this whole cycle in the first place, which makes the time-travel angle even more interesting.
There’s also a moment where the group discusses Evil Dead: The Mummy (2025, directed by Lee Cronin), which Meaghan argues is functionally an Evil Dead film wearing a mummy film’s clothes. The lore fits. The structure fits. Eleazar says he’ll believe it’s truly canon when Sam Raimi says so himself, but he agrees the franchise needs to grow beyond just someone accidentally reading the book aloud. At some point, the deadites should simply exist in the world.
Ash Williams, Bruce Campbell, and What Makes a Horror Icon
A significant portion of the episode is devoted to just how strange and specific Bruce Campbell’s role in these films is. Meaghan points out that Ash in the first film is almost self-effacing, hesitant, not particularly heroic. By the second film, he’s a slapstick action hero. By Army of Darkness, he’s a full-on swaggering antitype, the guy you root for partly because he’s such a magnificent idiot. Eleazar sums him up: “A likable dick, which is funny.“
The group discusses the first film’s ending, which is unusual in American horror for letting evil actually win. Ash survives but barely, and the final image offers no real relief. Eleazar compares it to the Denzel Washington film Fallen (1998), another film where evil is genuinely triumphant at the end, which lands differently than the typical “everyone’s fine, go home” conclusion. Arthur and Meaghan both agree that horror is sometimes better when it doesn’t wrap everything up cleanly.
Eleazar also brings up his love for Bobby Joe, a supporting character in Evil Dead II, specifically for the scene where she’s being dragged by something and says “you’re holding my hand too tight,” only for everyone to slowly look down and realize what is actually holding her.
It’s a perfect moment of practical horror comedy. Meaghan counters with her own favorite: the mirror scene, where Ash’s own reflection reaches out and grabs him. That scene gets a callback in Army of Darkness, where the reflection shatters into dozens of miniature evil Ash versions who then tie him down and torment him. Eleazar’s comparison:
It’s like Gulliver’s Travels, but a horror movie.
Where the Franchise Is Going, and What We’re Actually Excited About
The episode closes with a look ahead. Evil Dead Burn is coming this summer and looks genuinely wild. Meaghan notes that the trailer seems to include a deadite by a lake that may connect directly to the cold-open of Evil Dead Rise, where a woman on a lake boat is pulled under. If that’s the case, these films are doing something the franchise hasn’t really done before: threading a continuous narrative across multiple standalone stories.
The group also spends some time on the broader nostalgia wave that’s currently rolling through Hollywood, from Mortal Kombat 2 to the upcoming Masters of the Universe film and a Street Fighter adaptation that apparently has everyone cautiously optimistic. Meaghan says we’re on the nostalgia bandwagon for now, and we know it, and we’re enjoying it while it lasts.
Eleazar wraps up by talking about Nightmare Echoes’ upcoming summer programming: a block of water horror, vacation horror, and camping horror, including episodes on The Ritual, Final Girls, Infinity Pool, and a full Insidious franchise run before the next sequel drops. He also mentions that they’ve recorded every episode of their complete Hellraiser retrospective, releasing them slowly through December.
If you want to find Nightmare Echoes, Eleazar is most active on Instagram and Threads at @nightmareechoespod, and the podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and wherever else you listen.