Evil Dead Remake Director Reveals an Alternate Ending Sam Raimi Advised Them to Change

Evil Dead remake director Fede Alvaraz recently spoke to the Boo Crew Podcast (via Bloody Disgusting), where he discussed an alternate ending to the 2013 film. Ultimately, producer and filmmaker Sam Raimi, who directed the classic original Evil Dead trilogy,k advised the crew to change the original ending. Below are some highlights.

Alvarez on the original ending: “The original ending – we shot some of it – ended like the original movie. [Mia] was going to walk out of the house, she’s limping away from the house and suddenly the force – you know, the crazy camera running through the woods – would come out of the house, she would turn around, scream, and that would be it, that would be the end of it. In the script, we went a little bit further and we say, well, that’s what we saw in the original movie, so I think we should see more this time,” he continues. “So we will do this shot, and after she turns and screams, we will see what happened to her. It was written as she levitates for the first time – because you never see levitation in the movie. It was kind of the rules of [our] Evil Dead, to never see anything that tells you right away that you’re in a supernatural world. So no one floats [in] Evil Dead. But in the last moment, she will float. Suddenly her body was all tensed up like Exorcist-style, and then we were going to rip her apart like every limb or something like that. She was going to explode into this bomb of blood.“

Alvarez on why the ending changed: “So that’s what we wrote and Sam Raimi – he’s a wise guy [who] was also more sensitive to the character and the experience of the audience – [said] she deserves to live. After everything she’s been through, I think the audience is going to want her to live. It would be unfair to pull something out of the hat and just say, ‘Now she dies’. And I was like, ‘Well, that’s what you did in the original,’ and he was like, ‘Well, I didn’t think Ash deserved to live.’ So we changed that and that was the ending you see [in] the movie.”