Evil Dead II Film Analysis

            Evil Dead II is an 80’s American comedy/fantasy horror film. The film is about a man who takes his girlfriend into a cabin in the woods. Here he plays a tape which awakens an evil force that possesses his girlfriend. The professor’s daughter and others turn up but one by one they are taken over/killed.

Todorov suggested that there are 5 stages of narrative. The first is Equilibrium, which is the normality that we are first introduced too. After this, there is a disequilibrium, which disrupts the equilibrium, causing a problem with the normality of the character’s world. Once there is recognition of the disequilibrium, there is then an attempt to repair it. This ultimately leads to a new equilibrium that is different to the first one due to the events that have taken place.
             Evil Dead II follows this structure as at the start, everything is fine and ‘Ash’ has just taken his girlfriend to a random house in the woods. Disequilibrium happens quite quickly when Ash plays the tape, awaking evil forces. This disruption is recognised when Ash’s girlfriend gets possessed by an evil spirit. An attempt to repair the disequilibrium is basically Ash killing

off the zombies when they come, and trying to recite the spell that gets rid of the evil, with the help of the professor’s daughter. The end of the film, where Ash gets sucked into another world is the new equilibrium.

Within Evil Dead II, it is easy to identify the good people from the bad. The bad guys are the evil spirits trying to take the characters’ lives from them, and the good are the people who are trying to stay alive and defeat the evil spirits.
            Levi- Strauss put forward that the world is described in binary opposites, the idea that themes within stories and real-life consist of differences, contradictions and conflict. We can easily apply this to Evil Dead II. Evil characters within films are normally ugly, and in horrors normally have something to do with night time and the supernatural. These all apply to the evil spirits. Good characters are normally better looking than the evil ones, which we can certainly say that the characters fighting back definitely look better than the dead themselves. Evil characters are also considered to normally be from ‘outside’ the country/culture. The spirits from this film are from another world, so this would apply.

Within most narratives there are several character types. This idea was developed by Propp who studied many fairy tales, legends and folklores, noticing that they all had similar problems and character types. These characters are the hero, villain, dispatcher, donor, helper, heroine and the false hero. The hero of Evil Dead II is Ash, as he is on a quest to restore normality. The villains are the evil spirits as they cause the disruption and oppose the hero. In this film, there isn’t really a dispatcher as no one really sends the hero on his way, things just seem to start happening as soon as the tape is played. The donor is probably the professors’ daughter, as she gives Ash the idea of using the spell, and also translates it fully with her last dying breath. This character could also be seen as the helper. I think the false hero is probably Jake, the hillbilly, as he seems like a mildly good person at the start when he and Bobby Joe show the Professors Daughter and her companion how to get to the shack, but when Bobby Joe goes missing, he insists on all of them going to the woods to find her and throws the pages of the old book down into the cellar with one of the evil spirits.

In conclusion, Evil Dead II follows these theories quite closely. In all honesty, I enjoyed this film, although I found it slightly more humorous than scary. The effects, for their time, are pretty good, and probably took quite a lot of effort to create.