Latent Image - Spring 1996

"Who's Laughing Now?": Tricksters in the Evil Dead Trilogy

by Craig Henderson
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Sam Raini’s The Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, and Army of Darkness constitutes a comic-horror text that has reached cult status because of its affective power to evoke raucous laughter, revulsion and narrative tension, sometimes all during the same scene. Its success is illustrated by the existence of the annual Evil Dead festival at the University of Minnesota, and the talk recently given at the University of Michigan by Bruce Campbell, an actor who both assisted in production and played the major character Ash-the shotgun toting, chainsaw-armed protagonist with a Jim Carrey-like disposition towards the forces of chaos.

The cross-textual Ash is a "trickster"-a complex character positioned to be a cultural hero within the narratives, but at the same time responding with buffoonish lines and antics, stumbling almost drunkenly over the brink of insanity and back. He is a clever creator and manipulator of technology at times, a dim-witted and destructive fool at others. He is a fast-talker who insults allies and enemies alike, loses control of himself and his body parts, battles his fragmented identities, and confronts creatures from beyond the grave with high schoolish, hyper-masculine threats.

Similarly, the demonic forces that manifest as various demons, witches, zombies and skeletons in the woods of Tennessee (and the medieval setting of the latest movie) often will act to subvert expectations by nullifying horror and pain with a well-placed comic twist, doing battle with Ash on the same confused, enraged, and at times loony grounds.

These dualities strongly suggest a reading of Ash and his antagonists as Trickster figures, much like Rabbit, Coyote, and Ictinike of Omaha legend, Brer Rabbit and Anansi of Afro-American folklore, or like Bugs Bunny and Jim Carrey of contemporary popular culture. The trickster of these legends is a creature of contrasting qualities: creative/destructive, divine/brutish, powerful/degenerate, brilliant/stupid. The trickster is unpredictable, divinely mad, and is a bringer/marker of great things. It does not experience true pain or death, and is not constrained by the body: it can twist about or pull off body parts, and reattach them with nothing more than annoyance.

The dual nature of Ash- "Cultural Hero" and comic "Trickster" poking fun at the forces of evil-positions him as a strong (and at the same time amusing) focus of audience identification, a method of empowerment that serious horror films find more difficult (unless the monster is truly fear- inspiring and the hero of near-legendary quality).

The narratives crafted by Raimi and Campbell pit powerful demonic force against a dim-witted, out-of-his-element department store clerk. This raises the potential for Ash to be the central joker. At the butt end of the power structure, he is freed from the constraints of the horror genre to make light of his situations (lessening dramatic tension for the audience) and insult powerful characters with impunity.

Army of Darkness picks up where Evil Dead II left off: Ash has been gated back to the Dark Ages, along with the evil life force the terrible Necromicon harnesses for its power. Ash quests after the Necromicon to help defend the living (a lord, a wench, and other inhabitants of a castle) from an approaching demon scourge. The story revolves around Ash's failure to perform the proper incantation while removing the Necromicon from a graveyard, causing an army of skeletons to rise, led by the evil entity-in the form of an undead Ash-in massive warfare against the castle occupants.

This graveyard scene is most illustrative of Ash's capacity as a trickster. On a mossy altar lie three identical Necromicons. He complains aloud about his predicament, then selects one. It opens to reveal a spinning vortex that pulls in his head like toffee. He recoils; his face has be en grotesquely stretched, but he is able to shake it, dog-like, back into shape. The second book animates and attacks him as if it were a bird. Ash stops himself before seizing the last book; realizing he must recite an incantation taught him by a sage ("Klaatu Verata Nictu," words that activated the robot in the 1950s science fiction The Day the Earth Stood Still). As he recites, he forgets the last word, remembering only that it begins with "N;" so he recites the formula once more, coughing over the last word He assures the night air that he played by the rules, grabs the book, and of course the undead rise to assail him.

Encapsulated in this scene are echoes of a trickster heritage: arrogant trouble-seeking, immunity from bodily mutilation, a tendency to flub the crucial moments of an adventure, and miserable attempts to deceive an opponent-all of which combine to elevate the sense of ludicrous danger.

One Afro-American tale, "The Lion in the Well" (Abrahams), has Brer Rabbit in a macho confrontation with Brer Lion to convince him
to curb his destructive eating habits, since the rest of the community is too cowardly. When he meets the lion, he begins quivering and stuttering and changes his story, claiming that consensus was that as you are the big boss of the whole world it isn't right for you to have to go out and get your own vittles. Here, Brer Rabbit fails to carry through in a heroic capacity due to a loss of nerve. In the "Klaatu Verata Nictu" sequence, Ash is recruited to fulfill the legend, despite his arrogant indifference, and fails in mission again due to loss of control (this time, memory). A parallel construction can be seen in the story "Anansi Climbs the Wall": Nansi boasts to his wife that he is going to Brer Death's fields at night to steal yams. His wife tells him that duppies (ghosts) will catch him, but he brushes this off only to get caught red-handed by Brer Death, who interrogates him:

Like Brer Rabbit, Nansi foolishly puts himself in danger, and fails in his mission by getting aught. He attempts to deceive Brer Death with facetiously weak excuses, and then must run for his life. Ash's fakery of the incantation is similar.

In addition to the psychological aspects of the trickster, we need to examine transgressions of the body, a theme shared by both horror and comedy in literature. The casual contortion of Ash's head in the graveyard scene is an indicator of his regenerative physicality. a central element to the trickster tales. In the Omaha legend "How Rabbit Killed a Giant, Rabbit is squashed into a bloody mess by the giant, rises to deliver insults, and is squashed again as the fight continues. In "How Rabbit Killed the Black Bear," Rabbit kills the bear chief and flings its scrotum at the bear tribe in defiance, for which he is caught and torn to pieces. His grandmother places his pieces in a bag, returns home, and empties the sack to find Rabbit alive again. Finally, in "Ictinike and Buzzard," the nebulous Ictinike exacts revenge on Buzzard by faking death so well that the various birds of carrion can bite off hunks of his body without so much as a flinch. Buzzard, perceiving a fat elk, enters his anus for a bite but is squeezed, stripping off his head feathers. This particular episode demonstrates a decoupling of the will from the realities of the flesh, allowing the trickster to pull off impossible feats: like Ash's facial contortions, Ictinike's yawning sphincter and Rabbit's injury-resistant body. To some degree, the ability of protagonists of contemporary horror to withstand multiple wounds and trauma could be called a characteristic of the genre, but the impossibilities inflicted on Ash are of another caliber.

These impossibilities are most prevalent when Ash's identity begins to splinter. In one scene of Evil Dead II, Ash's hand becomes possessed and begins attacking him, breaking plates over his head while twittering in laughter. When the hand drags him across the room towards a knife with which to kill him, Ash pins his hand to the floor with another knife and laughs spitefully: "Who's laughing now? The pain barely affects him, in fact he is more than happy to saw off the demon hand and replace it with a chainsaw blade. (The killer hand is contained under a bucket weighted with the book A Farewell to Arms.) This fragmentation of bodily identity bears strong resemblance to the Omaha tale in which Trickster angrily shoves a flaming branch up his anus to keep it from talking back to him. The recurring image for the Omaha, however, is of the trickster replicating its identity, as opposed to battling its own splintered body. In "Rabbit and Ictinike," Ictinike wants to sodomize Rabbit but is sodomized himself; baby rabbits drop repeatedly out of his anus and run off into the wilderness. In "How Rabbit Killed the Black Bear," Rabbit's dung is animated and can give the scalp yell and fight along with him. In a later scene of Army in the Darkness, these two identity frameworks combine: a broken mirror in an evil place spawns miniature Ash doubles to jump out of the glass and attack the primary Ash. They defeat him, and one dives into his mouth. As a result, his body begins mutating: first an eye bubbles out of his shoulder, which becomes a second head, and eventually he fissions off a full-grown, evil Ash who becomes the main antagonist from that point on, giving rise to scenes reminiscent of the antagonisms between the two tricksters in "Rabbit and Ictinike."

To elicit deeper levels of the Ash construction itself, however, we need to look more closely at tradition. The Omaha and Afro-American tricksters are found within a body of stories whose serial and discursive nature lead towards characteristics fashioned to fit cultural needs:
to provide explanations, to enforce social boundaries, to embody the ambiguities of humanity and/or nature. Folktales such as "Ictinike and Chipmunk" start off with a reference to other parts of the cycle, and the Trickster will often react to other characters or situations in relation to this history, acknowledging his diegetic past but never attempting to change his base nature. It is this self-conscious interlinking of narratives, shaped by cultural agenda, that motivates the trickster's arrogance, stupidity, clownish deceptions, and physical immunity. These traits are necessary both to allow for narrative continuity and progression, and to address audience familiarity and generic expectation: we expect Coyote to walk into an obvious trap. We expect Rabbit to be beaten to a pulp and rise again, undaunted. To develop or otherwise alter the character would end the narrative cycle, and the cultural possibilities arising from it as well.

Similarly, by the time we get around to Army of Darkness. Ash has another (if much smaller) body of related cultural works from which to draw, primarily the first two films in the series, but also the entire genre of' 70s-80s low-budget horror films. Now, his role as cultural custodian of these works is full-fledged. The audience expects and is expected to be aware of his past, and if not, they are brought up to speed by encapsulated summary. His performance, then, depends on his history as a simple protagonist in a horror story of the world's invasion by demonic forces. He gains experience, and is made cynical by that experience. As he is drawn into a new adventure, narrative progression and audience familiarity with his arrogance will ensure that he will throw himself headlong into this danger, the demons will become unleashed on the world because of his stupidity, his initial clownish attempts at deception will fail but, since he is the hero, pain and mutilation are momentary, so his physical immunity will win the battle.

In Army of Darkness, Ash takes convincing before he goes on the quest to the graveyard, but when it is clear that he is stuck in the Dark Ages he sets out with determination; he has faced demons before and, if anything, is annoyed by the reprise. His overconfidence causes him to brush off the importance of the magic incantation, and thus, at the crucial moment, he forgets. As he picks up the book, dooming the other humans in the story he attempts to convince the waking forces of evil that all is well, and fails. Finally, he defeats the demons through cleverness and valor and returns to his own time to fulfill his role as a clerk once more-sort of. The final dialogue with the other clerks shows that he misspoke the magic words that would restore him to his own reality-a female customer becomes possessed, and he battles her until she is dead and smoking. In effect, he is doomed to forever fight the battle with demons; it is his divine nature. One only need look at his first appearance in the film to be convinced of his divine origin as a cultural hero: a spectacular slow-motion fall through thin air from the text of Evil Dead II (along with his rusted-out car) that land him, amid clouds of dust, at the feet of the noble lord's army.

Here the cultural functions of jokes and the joker figure provide additional insight into the nature of the Ash character. Mary Douglas asserts that a joke can defeat the psychic censor since "it brings into relation disparate elements in such a way that one accepted pattern is challenged by the appearance of another which in some way was hidden from the first." This allows the unconscious creative energy to bubble forth, hence the pleasure and possible loss of bodily control through laughter. Douglas suggests that jokes are an affirmation of the arbitrariness of accepted patterns, and the telling of jokes is always socially situated; thus the symbolic leveling of hierarchy unleashed by the joke will always have subversive potential. The joker is privileged to use this power with impunity:

By inserting the battle-weary Ash in a romantic world of medieval fantasy that orders and controls his experiences, a tension is set up between his political powerlessness in that world and the empowering knowledge-both of the modern world and of demons-he carries with him. This tension manifests itself in a cynical outlook, which he unleashes at every opportunity with insults and commentary directed at the appropriate parties, transgressing peasant/nobility social norms. At the beginning of Army of Darkness, Ash is about to be thrown into "The Pit" along with the nobleman Henry the Red and his men, political prisoners of the castle lord. Ash informs Henry the Red, his only potential ally in the Pit, that "the only thing you've got going for you is Jack the Shit, and Jack left town." He spurns a woman who fawns on him, offering wine and food to apologize for stoning him: "first you want to kill me, now you want to kiss me." He repeatedly calls the peasantry and nobility "primitives" and treats them with disdain. He is allowed to get away with this treatment with the soldiers, the two nobles, the wench and the sage since he has been assigned the role of the joker: so much is stacked against him that he is allowed to step outside the bounds of allowable behavior in the given power structure to poke fun at anyone who would interfere with his quest, and no one attempts to hamper this carnivalesque evaluation of the romantic setting for the horror audience's benefit. When he defeats the creatures of the Pit and climbs out, he challenges the entire castle population to a fight: "Who wants some? Huh?" An unruly troll leaps out of the Pit, and Ash spins on his feet to blast at it with his shotgun. scaring it back into the Pit. He uses this opportunity to use his past identity as a clerk for leverage while making fun of their ignorance. "The name's Ash. Housewares." He then holds his shotgun aloft and describes the qualities and price of his "broomstick," urging them to "shop smart. Shop S-Mart!"

This performance would merely mark Ash as a dangerous lunatic in our culture, his gun would be taken away and he would be locked up. However, his out-of-his-own-culture bluffing and brandishing of a bizarre new (magical?) weapon awes the medieval crowd, and they revere him. To carry through with this deception he must quest for the Necromicon, despite his wish to return home. Hence, he cannot avoid his fate and nature as a trickster: he harnesses the joker's untouchable nature to equalize power hierarchies and pull off a deception, but as soon as he is successful, the deception backfires and he must now face his quences...and the story advances. In the end, Ash's newly found social status becomes void since he must be pulled out of that society; he is forever the transitory character. The end of Army of Darkness affirms this. Again he has a lowly cultural status (clerk instead of prisoner), but he still has his differentiating demonic knowledge which he can immediately apply to the possessed woman (with the one-liner, "Come get some"). The cycle continues, with continuity and cultural knowledge preserved.

The character of Ash is a curiosity in the horror world. He is hero, coward, genius, dimwit, buffoon, madman, and brute, all rolled into one narratively delicious package. He cannot die, he cannot be hurt, he can only be annoyed- although he may accidentally raise the minions of hell
to feast upon the living in the process. Ash is more informed than most horror protagonists: by Army of Darkness, he's seen it all before, so he can gleefully throw aside the conventional power structures of the medieval humans, take on a joking role and ridiculing them freely. He and the demons constantly engage in one-ups and routines at the other's expense, using exaggeration and timing to transform events that otherwise create sheer disgust into comic moments. Ash removes the sting from expectation and affective horror through comic expertise, while simultaneously defeating the demonic forces.

The reason this film series became a cult favorite might be its primary character: a cultural hero who can transcend the constraints of a thoroughly saturated and self-conscious genre as well as trickster figure, so infrequent in contemporary media.

WORKS CITED

Abrahams, Roger D., ed. Afro-American Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World. New York: Pantheon, 1985, 179-217.

Douglas, Mary. Implicit Meanings. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1975, 90-114.

Welsch, Roger ... Omaha Tribal Myth and Trickster Tales. Chicago: Sage, 1981, 17- 87.