From the boomer audience who watched the first trilogy of The House in the cinema, loving it, and who grew older alongside its unmistakable Ash Williams, Bruce Campbell, we immediately plunged into the video interview the actor — now 68 and unfortunately afflicted by a cancer that is treatable but not curable — gave to Men’s Journal. The video can be seen below, but what interests us here is his remark about the three contemporary films of the saga, in which he appears as a producer (The House – The Fire of Evil only as executive producer), because it concerns a wish we have expressed many times as well. What distinguishes (or should distinguish) this from the many splatter franchises that crowd the screens? His ability to entertain despite disgust and tension. Especially in the two original sequels this component was very present. And be clear, we don’t intend to make us smile with a bit of macabre humor sprinkled here and there, but to truly pull a good laugh from us. And it’s not the only thing missing from the series’ films.
Bruce Campbell on the lack of irony and color in modern Evil Dead films
These are the exact words of Campbell regarding the lack of humor in the contemporary chapters of The House: “I would like them to bring more humor. The three films mostly lack it and personally I have a problem with this. There’s no reason for them to become too dark. You can scare without being too grim.” And on this, as far as we are concerned, we think it’s a generational thing: these directors, who weren’t born or were small at the time of the originals, grew up with splatter horror cinema accustomed to taking itself more seriously. The same goes for the look of the films, which, as Campbell rightly notes, is uniformly desaturated: “Modern directors love to color their films like a David Fincher film, like a hospital room, right? Gray-green, like a garage, with garage lights. Okay, it’s a choice, but not mine. I think even a horror film can look nice. Why not surprise the audience? Make everything look pretty and wonderful and then strike them.” In any case Campbell has expressed his hopes for the next film in the series, Evil Dead Wrath, directed by Francis Galluppi, which will be released on April 7, 2028 and is a prequel set in the seventies: “Wrath will be beautiful, because I saw the director’s first film and it was really cool.”
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