‘Evil Dead’
Blood” (1970). “Drive-ins were the market that created the opportunity for movies like this one to be made.
“The drive-ins are personally important to us as well,” he added. “Everything we do goes back to seeing all of these movies at the drive-in for the first time when we were growing up. Beyond the movies themselves, it was the bigger-than-life presentation at drive-ins and the showmanship of the old film distributors that made us horror movie fans. We want to keep that tradition alive.”
And drive-ins continue to be crucial for horror. Due to the Covid-associated nationwide shutdown of most indoor theaters, the unlikely top film at the U.S. box office for five weeks in a row, from May to early June, was “The Wretched,” a low-budget chiller booked mostly in drive-ins and directed by Brett Pierce — whom Campbell, like a proud papa, identified as the son of Bart Pierce, cocreator of the special effects and stopmotion animation on the first “Evil Dead.”
Looking back on four decades of “Dead,” Campbell said what has changed most dramatically over the years is “the visceral nature of filmmaking.”
“In the first ‘Evil Dead,’ “he said, “Ash hears a noise outside his window, swings his shotgun, and blows his window out. And the way you do that in 1979 is you put a shell in your shotgun and blow the window out. By the time Ash in ‘Ash vs. Evil Dead’ raises his shotgun, there’s no shell in any gun, not even blanks... There’s a digital flame . ... So it’s incredibly safe as opposed to really reckless, but the visceral nature has been removed.”
Beyond “Evil Dead,” Campbell has appeared in many television programs and films (notably for Raimi and the
VITAGRAPH FILMS
Coen Brothers), and been a voice actor on such movies as “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and “Cars 2.” But his Memphis relevance is most closely connected with “Bubba Ho-tep,” a surprisingly sincere and even elegiac 2002 movie from “Phantasm” director Don Coscarelli that cast Campbell as Elvis, now a resident in a nursing home (where no one believes he is Elvis), who teams up with a man who claims to be John F. Kennedy (Ossie Davis) to battle a resurrected Egyptian mummy. (Yes, that old plot again.)
Campbell admits he wasn’t an Elvis fan as a kid because “when I graduated high school in ‘76, he was over the hill, and he was dead a year later. But then you go back and look at that early ‘70s Las Vegas footage and you realize the guy was on fire, nobody could touch him.”
“Bubba Ho-tep” ends with the promise of a sequel, “Bubba Nosferatu,” but Campbell says that project, after many attempts at an acceptable script, is dead, and his aging Elvis hero has “officially retired.” Meanwhile, Campbell keeps on keeping on, and so do the demons of the Evil Dead: Ash will be absent, but Campbell will be working behind the scenes as a producer on an upcoming “Evil Dead” feature film from Irish director Lee Cronin.
FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 2020