Evil Dead Trivia
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60 free Evil Dead trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Evil Dead trivia quiz covers the whole franchise Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Rob Tapert built out of a $1,600 Super 8 prototype called Within the Woods. It runs from the freezing Tennessee cabin shoot of The Evil Dead (1981) through the splatstick of Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, the 2013 reboot with Jane Levy, the three seasons of Ash vs Evil Dead on Starz, Evil Dead Rise, Evil Dead Burn, the video games and the off-Broadway musical. Expect questions on the Necronomicon and its Sumerian passages, the chainsaw hand and the boomstick, the Oldsmobile Delta 88, S-Mart, the Fake Shemps, Stephen King's rave at Cannes, the video-nasty ban in Britain, and the behind-the-scenes stories of who got hurt making these films. Roughly a third of the questions are easy for anyone who has seen the trilogy, a third are medium, and the rest are for people who have listened to every commentary track. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic source and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who wrote and directed the original trilogy of Evil Dead films?
Sam Raimi
Sam Raimi directed all three, making The Evil Dead as his feature debut at 20; it began shooting in November 1979, weeks after his birthday.
Q 02What is Ash Williams's full first name, as his sister calls him in the original film?
Ashley
Bruce Campbell has said the name is short for Ashley, and Raimi toyed with the full name Ashley J. Williams for Army of Darkness.
Q 03What short film did Raimi and Campbell make in 1978 as a prototype to attract investors?
Within the Woods
Within the Woods, a 32-minute short shot in 1978 for about $1,600, was shown to Detroit-area doctors, dentists and other local investors to prove the concept.
Q 04In which state was The Evil Dead (1981) filmed, in a remote cabin with no plumbing?
Tennessee
The cabin sat outside Morristown, Tennessee; the shoot there began in November 1979 with no plumbing and dragged on for about twelve weeks.
Q 05Which horror novelist's rave review of The Evil Dead at Cannes in 1982 helped it find a distributor?
Stephen King
Stephen King praised it at Cannes in 1982 as 'the most ferociously original horror film of the year', a quote that went straight onto the posters.
Q 06What was the first film's working title before distributor Irvin Shapiro said it sounded boring?
Book of the Dead
Raimi shot it under the title Book of the Dead; distributor Irvin Shapiro thought that sounded dull, so The Evil Dead was chosen from a list of alternatives.
Q 07Where did Ash and his friends go to college, according to the original film's plot?
Michigan State University
Raimi and Tapert were themselves Michigan State students when they started planning a feature film.
Q 08Which two of Ash's companions in the first film are his girlfriend and his sister, respectively?
Linda and Cheryl
Linda is Ash's girlfriend and Cheryl his sister; Cheryl, played by Ellen Sandweiss, is the first to be possessed after the trees attack her in the woods.
Q 09Who plays Annie Knowby, the professor's daughter, in Evil Dead II?
Sarah Berry
Sarah Berry plays Annie Knowby, who arrives with missing pages of the Necronomicon and is stabbed by Ash's severed hand in the finale.
Q 10What nickname, inspired by Raimi's Three Stooges fandom, was given to stand-ins replacing unavailable actors?
Fake Shemps
Fake Shemps honoured the Three Stooges, whose producers hid doubles after Shemp Howard died in 1955; The Evil Dead's credits list several cast members as Fake Shemps.
Q 11Which future Oscar-winning filmmaker was an assistant editor on The Evil Dead, cutting the shed scene?
Joel Coen
Joel Coen, later an Oscar winner for Fargo and No Country for Old Men, was an assistant editor; he borrowed the prototype-trailer trick to raise money for Blood Simple.
Q 12In the UK, The Evil Dead was famously branded and banned as what kind of release in the 1980s?
A video nasty
The Evil Dead was branded a 'video nasty' and prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act; withdrawn from UK video after 1984, it passed fully uncut only in 2000.
Q 13What did Raimi call the camera-on-a-plank rig, carried by sprinting operators, that stood in for a Steadicam?
The shaky cam
Q 21To dodge an X rating, Evil Dead II was released unrated in the US through a shell company with what name?
Rosebud Releasing Corporation
The sequel's Italian producer set up Rosebud Releasing Corporation as a shell so Evil Dead II could go out unrated in March 1987 without an X rating tarnishing his studio.
Q 22Where did Evil Dead II shoot its exteriors, using a Color Purple farmhouse as its office?
Wadesboro, North Carolina
Wadesboro, North Carolina, had hosted The Color Purple; Raimi's crew used that film's farmhouse as a production office and shot the cabin exteriors nearby, hours from the producer's Wilmington studio.
Q 23At the end of Evil Dead II, Ash and his car are sucked through a vortex to which period?
Raimi dubbed it the 'shaky cam': a 16mm camera bolted to a plank that he and producer Rob Tapert sprinted with through the woods for the demon's point-of-view shots.
Q 14Which studio gave The Evil Dead its wide US release in April 1983?
New Line Cinema
New Line Cinema handled US distribution and opened the film wide on April 15, 1983, about eighteen months after its first Detroit screening.
Q 15The 1987 sequel was subtitled what in its publicity materials?
Dead by Dawn
Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn was the full title on its 1987 posters; the opening recap rewrites the first film so only Ash and his girlfriend visit the cabin.
Q 16Which Italian producer funded the 1987 sequel after the author who championed the first film phoned him?
Dino De Laurentiis
Dino De Laurentiis, then producing Maximum Overdrive with the novelist, put up the sequel's roughly $3.6 million budget and kept the story in the cabin.
Q 17In Evil Dead II, what does Ash attach to the stump of his right arm after cutting off his possessed hand?
A chainsaw
Ash mounts a chainsaw on the stump, strapping the modified prop to his forearm; the saw's petrol engine was replaced with an electric motor for safety and its teeth dulled.
Q 18Which Ernest Hemingway novel sits on top of the pile of books Ash uses to trap his severed hand?
A Farewell to Arms
The top book is A Farewell to Arms, a visual pun; the hand fight itself grew out of Attack of the Helping Hand, co-writer Scott Spiegel's 1979 short.
Q 19Which horror villain's clawed glove hangs in the cabin's tool shed in Evil Dead II?
Freddy Krueger
Freddy Krueger's razor glove hangs in the shed as a reply to A Nightmare on Elm Street, in which Nancy dozes off watching The Evil Dead on TV.
Q 20Who played the possessed Henrietta in Evil Dead II, sweating litres inside a full-body latex suit?
Ted Raimi
Raimi's younger brother Ted Raimi wore the Henrietta suit; his sweat can be seen pouring out of the costume's ear as Henrietta spins above the cellar.
The Middle Ages
The vortex drops Ash and his car into the Middle Ages, 1300 AD; Raimi had pitched that medieval premise for the sequel itself, but the producer wanted another cabin film.
Q 24What model of car does Ash drive through all three original films?
Oldsmobile Delta 88
Ash's 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 is Raimi's own car, slipped into nearly all his films; in Army of Darkness it is rebuilt into the steam-powered 'Deathcoaster'.
Q 25In Army of Darkness, what three-word phrase must Ash say to safely retrieve the Necronomicon?
Klaatu barada nikto
The phrase is lifted from the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still; Ash mumbles and coughs his way through it and dooms the kingdom.
Q 26In Army of Darkness, Ash works at which department store?
S-Mart
Ash is a housewares clerk at S-Mart, the store whose slogan he recites; by Ash vs Evil Dead, three decades on, he is stocking shelves at Value Stop instead.
Q 27Which line does Ash deliver after killing the Deadite in the store at the end of Army of Darkness?
Hail to the king, baby
Ash blasts the Deadite and says 'Hail to the king, baby' in the upbeat store ending, reshot after Universal rejected Raimi's bleaker original finale.
Q 28In Raimi's original, rejected ending for Army of Darkness, Ash oversleeps and wakes up where?
A post-apocalyptic London
Ash takes seven drops of the sleeping potion instead of six and wakes in a post-apocalyptic London, St Paul's in ruins; Universal found it too depressing.
Q 29What was Army of Darkness's working title?
Medieval Dead
It was shot as Medieval Dead, a pun Raimi enjoyed; the final title Army of Darkness came from distributor Irvin Shapiro, to whom the film is dedicated.
Q 30Who played Sheila, Ash's love interest in 1300 AD, in Army of Darkness?
Embeth Davidtz
Embeth Davidtz, later of Schindler's List, played Sheila; Bridget Fonda appears too, as Ash's girlfriend in the reshot opening recap.