Director, writer, and producer Sam Raimi announced at Comic-Con that he and Bruce Campbell are working on a TV adaptation of their beloved horror/slapstick/anti-literacy franchise The Evil Dead, a long-running series of movies, comics, and video games about the dangers of reading that most recently manifested in last year’s sequel/remake thing, directed by Fede Alvarez. Campbell, Raimi, and Raimi’s brother and frequent collaborator Ivan—who created the franchise together more than 30 years ago—are apparently working on the show’s script, with Campbell set to reprise his role as series hero, Ash Williams. Since 1992’s Army Of Darkness, Ash has largely been absent from the pop culture landscape, save for a two-second post-credits scene in the 2013 remake.
The 56-year old Campbell—who also appeared recently in a cameo in Raimi’s Oz The Great And Powerful, and completed a six-year stint as a wisecracking retired Navy Seal on USA spy series Burn Notice—is apparently still game to be turned into a human pinball by his old friend, responding to a fan on Twitter with a confident claim that he plans to star in the show.
Besides his film work, and before moving into the mainstream with the original Spider-Man trilogy, Raimi worked extensively in television, producing a lot of syndicated genre shows you might remember idly watching late at night, like Cleopatra 2525, Jack Of All Trades, and, most successfully, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, on which Campbell was a frequent guest star.
Given the cartoonishly bloody, “the gorier the merrier” violence of the Evil Dead series, it might be surprising to see it making the move to TV. But The Walking Dead has definitely proved there’s an audience on cable for this kind of gory, supernatural violence, although it remains to be seen if said audience is going to be receptive to having the antics of Bugs Bunny and the Three Stooges spliced into the mix.