![Garrett Summitt, playing Ash, runs through a scene during a rehearsal of \"Evil Dead: The Musical\" on Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018. The musical, based off of three \"Evil Dead\" movies between 1981 and 1992, runs from Jan. 3-6 at Vinyl Music Hall.
2018 1212 Rehearsal Evildead Musical 07](https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/c_crop,x_0,y_24,w_999,h_561/c_fill,w_720,ar_16:9,f_auto,q_auto,g_auto/images/ReutersImages/mmsport/304/01kx6fr2y9nvr83343j3.jpg "Garrett Summitt, playing Ash, runs through a scene during a rehearsal of \\"Evil Dead: The Musical\\" on Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018. The musical, based off of three \\"Evil Dead\\" movies between 1981 and 1992, runs from Jan. 3-6 at Vinyl Music Hall.
2018 1212 Rehearsal Evildead Musical 07")
The Evil Dead franchise began from the humblest of roots, with Sam Raimi recruiting a gaggle of his pals to come out to the woods with him and film a shoestring-budget horror movie, and yet, it has now become a long-running series and a bona fide institution of the horror genre. With the sixth installment of the series, Evil Dead Burn, now hitting theaters, it’s a perfect time to look back at the franchise’s trajectory over the years and gauge which installments hold up the best.
For the record, to paraphrase a quote from early on in Evil Dead Rise, there are no bad Evil Dead movies. So even the lowest entry on this list is still a rock-solid horror film that is worthy of your time, attention, and praise. With that in mind, here is the definitive ranking of the Evil Dead movies.
6. Evil Dead Rise (2023)
I like Evil Dead Rise a lot. It has some great performances (Alyssa Sutherland, Lily Sullivan, and Nell Fisher are all especially fantastic), a solid family angle, dynamic visual work from director Lee Cronin, and some really solid scares. I just wish it utilized its difference of setting a bit more. Every previous Evil Dead movie had been set in cabins in the woods, and this film promised one set in a high-rise apartment building. But for the overwhelming majority of the film, the action is set within a single apartment set, which might as well just be another cabin in the woods.
I also am just not a big fan of the climax of this one. Rather than feeling like an organic culmination of the film, it just kind of feels like semi-gratuitous fan service. It certainly makes it feel more Evil Dead-esque, but I think it comes at the cost of the film as a whole. Overall, a really solid entry, but something has to come last, and this is it. I’m sorry, Lee Cronin. For what it’s worth, I actually really enjoyed your The Mummy movie, so you can have that as a consolation prize.
5. Evil Dead (2013)
The late ‘00s and early 2010s were a weird period of time for the horror genre. Looking back on it now, it seems so clear that this was a critical transitional period for the genre, in which trends like hyper-glossy horror remakes and torture porn were steadily dying off, while bold new genre fare was rising up. Fede Álvarez’s Evil Dead remake came at the tail end of this, releasing just one year before films like The Babadook and It Follows would come out and basically redefine the landscape of then-modern horror in the process.
To this end, 2013’s Evil Dead manages to be near the pretty high low-bar for the franchise’s quality, as well as a high watermark in terms of that era’s horror remakes. There’s been lots of discussion of this film that tries to stack it up against Raimi’s films (you know, kind of like what I am doing right now), but I ultimately think that’s kind of folly.
The real barometer of this film’s success is to compare it to the other horror remakes of the time, like 2007’s Halloween, 2009’s Friday the 13th, or 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street; all of these make this movie look like a minor miracle. The film as a whole has ups-and-downs, but good lord, if that third act isn’t still an undeniably riveting and gonzo final stretch, I don’t know what is.
4. The Evil Dead (1981)
What is there to say about Sam Raimi’s iconic original film that hasn’t already been said in the intervening decades? This little independent film was powered by little more than gumption and an insane amount of artistic passion on the part of Raimi and star Bruce Campbell and resulted in one of the most enduring horror films of all time.
Without this film, not only is there no Evil Dead franchise, but there’s no Sam Raimi as a filmmaker, period. Like George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead before it, The Evil Dead is a film that turns its starkest limitations into its greatest strengths and manages to deliver a genuinely unforgettable horror experience in the process.
3. Evil Dead Burn (2026)
The newest installment in the Evil Dead franchise also happens to be the best cinematic installment since Raimi’s original trilogy. It’s a gruesome, ferocious, and frequently bleakly hysterical film that is both adoringly indebted to the original films and more than willing to irreverently thumb its nose at them in the name of carving out a new path of its own. Writer and director Sébastien Vaniček delivers a non-stop, adrenaline-pumping, dread-soaked thrill ride of a film that manages to not only keep up the insatiable pace it establishes early on but also continuously escalate things even further as it goes.
The resulting work is frequently delirious. The best thing about Evil Dead Burn is just how fresh and original it feels. For as much as I like the two previous entries in the franchise preceding this, there were definitely moments that could feel like the filmmakers engaging in some Evil Dead karaoke, singing along to the tropes of old. But here, Vaniček recontextualizes so much of the craft and storytelling of those original films in the service of creating something new. Great stuff.
2. Army of Darkness (1992)
The fact that Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead trilogy closes out with a gonzo gothic blockbuster that feels like the work of Ray Harryhausen and Hammer Horror got mashed into a blender with an ‘80s fantasy epic is almost too good to be true. The series that began with a film that dared to push the boundaries of what ultra-low-budget filmmaking could do ascended the ranks and earned Raimi his first bona fide blockbuster, putting him on the path that would lead to later works like Darkman and Spider-Man.
The setpieces here are unbelievable, the humor is cranked up for maximum lunacy, and Bruce Campbell’s multiple performances are nothing short of astonishing. Everything about this film feels like a bunch of ambitious kids let loose on a classic Hollywood soundstage, putting together one of the most insane and joyous action-horror-comedy films of all time. If you can’t find something to love in Army of Darkness, you might need to re-evaluate some things.
1.Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (1987)
No disrespect to any of the other entries on this list, but the facts are simply the facts; Evil Dead II is one of the greatest films ever made. In returning to make a sequel to The Evil Dead after having spread his wings a bit, collaborating with the Coen Brothers on Crimewave, and earning a bigger budget to play with after finding success, Sam Raimi makes the horror comedy to end all horror comedies. From the opening frames, it establishes an extremely flippant relationship with the original film, showing that in Raimi’s eyes, nothing is sacred and everything is up for grabs.
This film features some of the most inventive and go-for-broke camerawork ever put into a film, sure to leave audiences in awe to this day. It’s scary, it’s funny, and it’s just pound-for-pound obscenely entertaining.
Once again, Bruce Campbell is on a whole other level here, especially when it comes to standout setpieces like Ash versus his own hand. The man is the successor to silent clowns like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, starring in the middle of a gonzo horror movie, and Raimi leans all the way into the lunacy of that situation in the greatest of ways.
Just one of the best things ever put to film, period. An insane movie that I could not adore more.
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