Evil Dead IV will actually happen

In real life, Bruce Lorne Campbell (not to be confused with briefly famous glam rocker Bruce Wayne Campbell) doesn't have a chainsaw or sawed-off Remington as a prosthetic arm like he does in cult horror classic Evil Dead II. But the actor's role as Ash Williams in the Evil series has earned him rare B-movie fame—enough to garner cameos in all three Spiderman movies, and some Burn Notice love, too.

Fame, however, has this nasty habit of staying attached to its source. Two weeks ago, at Comic-Con, Evil Dead director Sam Raimi announced that after an apparent end to the trilogy back in 1992 with Army of Darkness, the franchise will, in fact, return with a fourth installment. And Campbell is all in. As he told MTV recently, "When [Raimi] is ready, I’m ready."

While Evil Dead IV seems an eventual certainty at this point, very little else—really, nothing—is ready for the telling. "Nobody knows anything," said Campbell, though he indicates a desire to harken back the early Evil days, when filming happened on in a low-scale way. "If we were really smart, we’d go back to a handheld movie and shoot it in 16mm and find someplace in the middle of nowhere. And have a crew of 10 people.” There is also no word on whether IV will pick up in present time, or in the post-apocolyptic future that Ash arrived at in an alternate ending to Army of Darkness.

As far as the 16-year gap between Army and Evil Dead IV,  Campbell speculated that his advanced years will be handled differently than in recent fourth films Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Live Free or Die Hard, which both took on younger characters to span the generation from aging stars. “I think the audience would be insulted if you did [that],” he said.

When it comes down to it, the Evil Dead movies are really about one thing for Campbell:  "You’re only appealing to one demographic and that’s people who like horror movies," he argued, brandishing his famously jutting chin. "And you just have to please them."

Related links:
The Evil Dead on IMDb
News: Sam Raimi's Evil Dead becomes a Broadway musical
Bruce-Campbell.com

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