It’s astonishing the longevity of the “Evil Dead” series, given how deliberately thin the original film’s mythology was.
In Sam Raimi’s 1981 low-budget classic, “The Evil Dead,” a group of college kids, including the acerbic Ash (Bruce Campbell) hole up in a remote forest cabin for the usual reasons, when they find an evil-looking book in the basement — the Necronomicon — and a mysterious tape recorder.
Playing back the tape, they hear evil incantations from the book, read by the cabin’s previous tenant.
The spell awakens evil monsters who kill the college kids and are generally a nuisance to Ash. In the 1987 sequel-cum-remake, “Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn,” it’s further established that a second spell can banish the monsters back to Hell …
and also throw Ash back in time to the 14th century.
The third film in the series, 1993’s “Army of Darkness,” takes place in the distant past,
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