The absolute mess of ‘The Evil Dead’ in Italy, where it has 10 installments full of fake sequels

When Sam Raimi had his first hit thanks to The Evil Dead, back in 1981, he soon started thinking about a sequel. Although he wanted to make Army of Darkness, the truth is they forced him to make a kind of remake-sequel of the first film, with more budget and more comedy, that ended up becoming Evil Dead II. However, because they took so long to continue the franchise, there was one country that decided to take the reins and do something very common at the time: just make up sequels out of thin air.

They’re knocking at the door again, all right, who is it?

If you live outside Italy, The Evil Dead is a very easy saga to follow: there are 5 films and a remake, plus the short Raimi and Bruce Campbell made to show it was possible to make a low-budget horror film. However, in Italy things get complicated, because in Italy, La Casa (the name they gave the first film) has 10 installments, of which only 5 belong to the main saga.

Seeing the success of the saga, Joe D’Amato decided to continue it on his own, unofficially, in 1988 with La Casa 3, directed by Umberto Lenzi and in which a ghostly girl and her enchanted doll create chaos in an abandoned house. It was another hit that got some traction abroad, where it was retitled Ghosthouse, and it spurred them to make La Casa 4, starring none other than David Hasselhoff this time. Yes, David Hasselhoff somehow appears in The Evil Dead, although it’s possible not even he knows it because in the rest of the world it was known as Witchery.

The plot no longer had anything to do with a house, or with demons, or with anything, and La Casa became a collection of stories with no connection between them. There would still be one more purely Italian La Casa film: La Casa 5, released outside Italy as Beyond Darkness, once again took place in a haunted house, this time by the spirit of twenty witches who were burned there. Things were starting to seem fishy, and clearly they needed to stop… or double down. Of course, you already know what they did.

Four years after the success of La Casa, another film came out that was a moderate hit in the country: House, a mind-blowing house (which there was called Chi è sepolto in quella casa?). With no ideas for La Casa 6, they decided it was time to resurrect the saga, and House II was transformed, just like that, into the sixth entry in a completely different franchise, a tradition that continued with House III, which became La Casa 7. And that was the end of the joke… for a few years.

House IV was released under its original name (well, House IV – Presenze impalpabili) and Army of Darkness, finally, was detached from the saga and titled, directly, L’armata delle tenebre. The experiment was shelved until 2013, when the remake of The Evil Dead went back to being called La Casa, something that has continued to this day with the two recent sequels, La casa – Il risveglio del male and La Casa: Il rogo del male. At least they haven’t gotten the idea of sticking one of the Scream films into the saga, so we’ve made some progress.

Because yes, nostalgia is all very well, but it’s even better to give a bit of thought to the fact that maybe the past wasn’t better: it was simply earlier.