The Original Ending for Fede Alvarez's EVIL DEAD Reboot Featured a Bomb of Bloody Insanity
I’m actually a fan of director Fede Alvarez's Evil Dead reboot that starred Jane Levy in the role of Mia, a drug addict who is determined to kick the habit.
To help in her efforts, she asks her brother, David, his girlfriend, Natalie, and their friends Olivia and Eric to go out into the woods to their family's remote forest cabin to help her through withdrawal. While there, Eric finds the mysterious Book of the Dead at the cabin and reads aloud from it, awakening an ancient demon. All hell breaks loose when the malevolent entity possesses Mia.
The end of that film was complete bloody madness! There was so much freakin’ blood! I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much blood in a horror film before. It was awesome! Well, it was almost even more insane! There was an original ending that saw Mia actually die at the end, and her death would not have been pretty.
On a recent episode of Bloody Disgusting's "Boo Crew" podcast, Álvarez explained what his original plan for the ending was and why producer Sam Raimi thought he should change it.
“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."
Yikes! That sounds disturbing on so many levels. When Raimi read the script, he explained to Álvarez that Mia being killed off would frustrate the audience, especially after everything she's been through. The audience would want her to survive. Thankfully she did. I loved the way the film ended, and I wish we would have gotten a sequel, but I’m happy with what we got and how the story ultimately played out.
What do you think about the original ending that Alvarez was planning?