Horror Tourism at a Convention: Bruce Campbell, Ted Raimi & Evil Dead Stories

Hello, spooky cats!

Some of our dark-tourism adventures involve real ghosts, historic cemeteries, battlefields, haunted hotels, and places connected to genuinely terrible events.

Others involve chainsaws, demonically possessed cabin dwellers, gallons of fake blood, and Bruce Campbell making fun of someone in the audience.

I think we can safely put this one under horror tourism.

We love horror conventions because they give fans something you cannot get from simply watching a movie at home. You get to meet the actors, wander through rooms filled with horror memorabilia, see amazing costumes, buy things your house absolutely does not need, and—one of my favorite parts—listen to the people who actually made these movies tell stories about what happened behind the camera.

This particular convention panel featured Bruce Campbell and Ted Raimi, which meant we were about to get a healthy dose of Evil Dead, Sam Raimi, acting stories, strange auditions, horses, Hollywood failures, and the kind of audience interaction that can only happen when Bruce Campbell is given a microphone.

It was not a normal panel.

Which made it considerably better.

Why Horror Conventions Count as Horror Tourism

I have started thinking of horror conventions as their own branch of dark tourism.

They aren't usually connected with genuine tragedy in the same way that Gettysburg or a historic prison might be.

Instead, we're traveling specifically because of our fascination with horror culture.

Movies.

Monsters.

Serial killers—both fictional and sometimes unfortunately real.

Special effects.

Ghost stories.

Dark art.

Costumes.

Horror history.

And the actors and filmmakers who helped create it all.

A horror convention becomes a temporary museum of nightmares.

Except the museum sells beer and somebody dressed as Michael Myers might be standing behind you while you're ordering nachos.

Bruce Campbell: Horror Royalty

Even if someone doesn't immediately recognize the name Bruce Campbell, horror fans know the face.

Or the chin.

Campbell became forever associated with Ash Williams, the increasingly battered hero of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series. His official credits include The Evil Dead films, Army of Darkness, Ash vs Evil Dead, Bubba Ho-Tep, Xena: Warrior Princess, Burn Notice, and many more projects.

But the story of Bruce Campbell and The Evil Dead is especially fascinating because it did not begin as some massive Hollywood production.

It began with a group of young filmmakers from Michigan who basically decided:

We want to make movies.

So let's figure out how.

Before The Evil Dead

Sam Raimi grew up in Michigan and started making movies as a teenager with friends including Bruce Campbell and Robert Tapert. Their early short film Within the Woods helped them raise money for what eventually became The Evil Dead.

The original film was made with very little money and very little experience.

MoMA describes The Evil Dead as Raimi's ultra-low-budget feature debut, made by a young cast and crew who turned physical discomfort, limited equipment, and a lack of resources into part of the movie's frantic style.

That is one of the things I love about horror history.

Some of the biggest horror franchises did not begin with giant budgets and corporate marketing departments.

They began with weird people saying:

"I have an idea."

Ted Raimi

Sitting alongside Campbell was Ted Raimi, younger brother of director Sam Raimi and a familiar face to horror and cult-TV fans.

Ted appeared in the Evil Dead world—including playing the wonderfully disgusting possessed Henrietta in Evil Dead II—and later became particularly recognizable as Joxer on Xena: Warrior Princess. His career also includes Army of Darkness, Darkman, the Spider-Man films, The Grudge, The Quarry, and plenty of other genre appearances.

Basically, if you watched enough Sam Raimi movies growing up, Ted Raimi would eventually appear.

Sometimes you'd recognize him immediately.

Sometimes you'd realize later:

Wait.

That was Ted?

Apparently the Audience Could Run the Panel Better

One of the funniest things about this particular panel was that Bruce and Ted decided normal interviewers were apparently unnecessary.

They talked about how often convention guests are asked the same questions repeatedly.

So why not let the fans conduct the interview?

Someone from the audience was selected to come up and essentially run part of the panel.

That seems dangerous.

I approve.

The questions immediately became exactly what you would expect when horror fans are given unsupervised access to Bruce Campbell.

Favorite color?

Who would win in a fight?

What underwear do you wear?

Important investigative journalism.

This is why convention panels are so different from carefully produced television interviews.

Nobody knows exactly where things are going.

Including the people onstage.

Bruce Campbell Versus Ted Raimi: Battle to the Death

At one point, the volunteer interviewer asked who would win in a battle to the death.

Naturally, Bruce needed more information.

What room are they in?

What weapons are available?

Is there furniture?

Is there a fire?

These are important considerations when deciding which horror actor you could kill with available household materials.

Eventually, Campbell determined that he could apparently kill Ted with a piece of wood.

Ted seemed less convinced that they needed to murder each other at all.

A reasonable position.

This is the kind of deep horror analysis we attend conventions for.

The Skeleton Escape Puzzle

Then Bruce delivered one of those ancient silly riddles involving being trapped in a room with a mirror and a skeleton.

Look in the mirror.

See what you saw.

Take the saw.

Cut the skeleton in half.

Two halves make a whole.

Escape through the hole.

Terrible.

Wonderful.

I am absolutely going to annoy someone with that later.

Boxers or Briefs?

Things deteriorated further.

Naturally.

At some point the conversation became an extended discussion about men's underwear.

I don't think anyone purchasing a horror-convention ticket necessarily expects to leave with Bruce Campbell's thoughts on why boxers twist around your legs.

But you get what you get.

This is why I love panels.

The scheduled topic might be Evil Dead.

Twenty minutes later you're discussing underwear.

What Is Bruce Campbell's Favorite Project?

Someone eventually returned the conversation to acting.

Campbell was asked about favorite projects.

His answer was very Bruce Campbell.

Rather than declaring one movie his masterpiece, he joked that his favorites were movies where he got paid quickly.

I respect that answer.

Actors often get asked to rank their own movies as if they sit at home watching themselves every weekend.

Campbell said he does not spend much time watching his own work.

For him, the project was something he experienced while making it.

The movie belongs to the audience afterward.

Imagine Watching Yourself Age on Film

One thing Campbell did point out was the strange experience his children can have watching his work.

His career spans decades.

That means they can essentially watch their father grow older on screen.

You can put on an early movie and see young Bruce Campbell.

Jump ahead.

Different Bruce.

Another decade.

Another face.

Eventually you're watching Ash vs Evil Dead.

It must be a bizarre family photo album.

Most of us just have embarrassing photographs.

Actors have Blu-rays.

The Reality of Acting: You Don't Get Most Jobs

One of the more useful parts of the panel had nothing to do with horror.

Both actors talked about rejection.

People tend to look at successful performers and assume they simply went from audition to audition collecting famous roles.

Reality is considerably less glamorous.

Actors audition constantly.

They lose roles constantly.

They almost get something.

Then someone else gets it.

Ted talked about auditioning for roles he wanted and not getting them.

Campbell joked about projects and opportunities that never happened.

It is a useful reminder that when we see someone's career, we're only seeing the jobs that worked out.

There is an invisible mountain of rejected auditions underneath it.

The Audition That Ended Bruce Campbell's Commercial Career

Then Bruce told one of my favorite stories from the panel.

Back in the 1990s, he was auditioning for commercials.

He had done plenty of them.

Fast food.

Products.

Whatever paid.

Then came an audition for Church's Chicken.

He entered a room.

Several serious advertising people sat watching him.

They played some ridiculous music.

Then they told him to...

Dance like a chicken.

So Bruce Campbell stood there performing chicken movements while several expressionless executives stared at him.

For an entire minute.

Then:

"Thanks. We'll call you."

He walked out understanding why the actors leaving before him had looked emotionally destroyed.

Apparently that was enough commercial acting.

Ash Williams can fight demons with a chainsaw.

Corporate poultry choreography was the breaking point.

Horror Actors Still Have Terrible Job Interviews

This is something convention panels reveal that fans don't always think about.

Famous actors still had terrible auditions.

Awkward meetings.

People who didn't understand their jokes.

Jobs they desperately wanted and didn't get.

Rooms where executives stared at them.

Everyone's career looks inevitable once you're looking backward.

Bruce Campbell was obviously destined to become Ash Williams.

Except he wasn't.

He was a working actor trying to get hired.

How Bruce Campbell Killed a Hollywood Meeting With One Joke

Campbell told another fantastic story about meeting an important director while the director was working on sound for a movie.

Campbell thought he could loosen things up with a joke.

The director was in the middle of serious sound mixing.

So Bruce made a very specific joke pretending to give detailed instructions about bringing up a cricket sound at an exact point in the movie.

The joke did not land.

At all.

Shortly afterward, Campbell found himself outside with his manager.

Meeting over.

The director reportedly told others that experiences like that were why he hated general meetings.

Bruce Campbell:

Professional meeting destroyer.

Failure Makes Successful People More Interesting

Stories like these were actually some of my favorite parts of the panel.

We already know the successes.

Evil Dead.

Army of Darkness.

Xena.

Spider-Man.

Burn Notice.

You can look up a filmography.

What you rarely see listed is:

1993 — Made terrible joke during important meeting. Did not get job.

But those failures tell you much more about what a career really looks like.

Even extremely successful people have periods where nothing works.

They get rejected.

They annoy people.

They embarrass themselves.

Then they keep going.

When Did Bruce Campbell Decide to Become an Actor?

Campbell also talked about how he ended up acting professionally.

There wasn't necessarily some dramatic moment where a mystical voice announced:

"BRUCE. YOU SHALL BECOME ASH."

He had ordinary jobs.

One was washing dishes.

Then he worked part of a day acting in an industrial film for General Motors.

Industrial films were essentially internal corporate productions—training materials, instructional films, and other things created for employees rather than theatrical release.

That half-day acting job paid the equivalent of several weeks of dishwashing.

Suddenly acting looked considerably more attractive.

Understandable.

Acting Wasn't Considered a Real Job in the Campbell Family

Campbell also talked about his family history.

His grandfather belonged to a generation that viewed work differently.

You got a job.

You went to work.

Whether you loved it was mostly irrelevant.

Campbell's father wanted to be an artist and eventually found a more creative path through advertising while also acting in local theater.

Young Bruce watched his father perform.

He saw this person who normally wore suits and went to work suddenly putting on costumes, acting, dancing, and receiving applause.

That helped show him another possibility.

Work could actually be something creative.

Watching Your Parent Become Someone Else

I thought this was one of the more interesting stories of the afternoon.

Children tend to see their parents in one role:

Parent.

Then imagine being a kid and seeing your father walk onto a stage as someone completely different.

Costume.

Lights.

Audience.

Applause.

For Bruce Campbell, that apparently opened a door.

His father became proof that ordinary people could perform.

And eventually Bruce followed him.

Except with considerably more fake blood.

The Michigan Horror Connection

This is one of the reasons I find the Evil Dead story so fascinating.

Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi were not Hollywood insiders waiting for somebody to hand them a horror franchise.

They were young filmmakers in Michigan making movies with friends.

Raimi experimented with filmmaking from childhood, and his collaboration with Campbell and producer Robert Tapert eventually produced Within the Woods and then The Evil Dead.

The movie was completed on a tiny budget by Hollywood standards and ultimately developed a cult following that spawned Evil Dead II, Army of Darkness, television, remakes and further films.

That is a pretty spectacular journey for something that started with friends messing around with cameras.

Why The Evil Dead Still Matters

Watch the original The Evil Dead today and it feels different from polished modern horror.

It is rough.

Aggressive.

Creative.

Sometimes ridiculous.

The camera races through the woods like the evil itself.

Bodies get destroyed.

Blood goes everywhere.

The effects look handmade because they were.

That handmade quality is part of its personality.

The movie's limitations forced Raimi and his crew to invent solutions instead of simply buying them.

The result became one of horror's most recognizable cult films. MoMA has since screened the film as part of its horror programming, describing its low-budget physical filmmaking as central to what makes it work.

Not bad for a bunch of young filmmakers from Michigan.

The Evil Dead Family

Another thing that becomes obvious when hearing stories from Bruce Campbell and Ted Raimi is how interconnected the Raimi filmmaking world became.

Sam Raimi directed.

Bruce Campbell acted and worked behind the scenes.

Robert Tapert produced.

Ted Raimi appeared in movies.

The same collaborators kept returning.

Then that group expanded outward into projects like Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules, Spider-Man, and numerous other films and television shows.

Bruce's official career archive includes everything from Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness to Xena, Bubba Ho-Tep, Burn Notice, and Ash vs Evil Dead.

Ted likewise became a familiar face across the Raimi universe and genre television.

If you like spotting familiar actors, Raimi productions are basically Where's Waldo for horror fans.

The Peter Jackson Horse War

Then came one of the strangest stories of the panel.

Bruce Campbell apparently still had unresolved horse-related feelings toward Peter Jackson.

While working on Jack of All Trades, Campbell needed a good black horse.

Everywhere his production went looking for one, they were reportedly told that Peter Jackson's people had already gotten there first.

Another farm?

Peter Jackson.

Another horse?

Peter Jackson.

Eventually Campbell's production ended up with a horse whose temperament apparently inspired the name Widowmaker.

Meanwhile, Peter Jackson's production had the beautiful hero horses.

Bruce remained bitter.

Understandably.

Campbell declared that because Peter Jackson stole all the good horses, he would never watch the movies.

This may be the greatest reason anyone has ever given for refusing to watch a film franchise.

Forget artistic criticism.

He took my horse.

The Stories You Don't Get From a Blu-ray Commentary

This is exactly why convention panels are so valuable to horror fans.

You can learn facts about movies anywhere.

Release date.

Director.

Budget.

Cast.

You can find all of that online.

But where else are you going to discover Bruce Campbell's decades-old grievance involving Peter Jackson and an allegedly homicidal horse?

That is the good stuff.

Horror Conventions Preserve Oral History

I've said this before, but the more convention panels we attend, the more strongly I believe it.

These panels are a kind of oral history.

The actors remember things that may never have been documented.

Auditions.

Arguments.

Deleted jokes.

Bad horses.

Production problems.

Early jobs.

Directors.

Other actors.

Things that went wrong.

Things that unexpectedly worked.

Not every memory will be perfectly accurate decades later. Human memory changes, details blur, and good stories sometimes become even better with repeated telling.

But these conversations still capture something important.

What making these movies actually felt like.

And Then There Is the Humor

A Bruce Campbell panel is never going to be a quiet academic lecture.

He knows what the audience wants.

He teases people.

He challenges questions.

He turns ordinary answers into stories.

He makes fun of himself.

He makes fun of Hollywood.

He occasionally makes fun of the person asking the question.

Ted Raimi plays along beautifully.

The result feels less like a formal celebrity appearance and more like being invited to sit near two guys who have accumulated several decades' worth of ridiculous stories.

That's much more fun.

Why Bruce Campbell Became a Horror Icon

Ash Williams should not really work as a traditional hero.

He's arrogant.

Frequently clueless.

Sometimes cowardly.

Often selfish.

He makes terrible decisions.

He gets beaten up constantly.

And eventually he straps a chainsaw to his arm.

Exactly the sort of person you want representing humanity.

But that imperfection is probably part of why horror fans love him.

Ash doesn't calmly defeat evil.

He survives evil while screaming, bleeding, insulting it, screwing something up, and somehow stumbling into victory.

The character became progressively funnier as the series continued, especially in Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness.

Campbell's physical comedy became as important as the horror.

Ted Raimi's Henrietta Is Still Horrifying

Ted Raimi has his own especially memorable place in Evil Dead history.

In Evil Dead II, he performed as the possessed Henrietta Knowby beneath an enormous amount of creature makeup.

Henrietta is disgusting.

I mean that as a compliment.

The character is one of those wonderful examples of practical 1980s creature work where you can practically feel how uncomfortable the performer must have been inside the costume.

Ted's larger career would eventually make him recognizable for completely different characters, especially Joxer in Xena: Warrior Princess.

Going from possessed basement monster to lovable wannabe warrior is impressive range.

Horror Tourism Is About Meeting the Humans Behind the Monsters

That may be my favorite part of attending conventions.

Movies create myths.

Freddy Krueger isn't Robert Englund.

Ash isn't Bruce Campbell.

Henrietta isn't Ted Raimi.

Michael Myers isn't whoever happens to be behind the mask in a particular sequel.

But after watching these characters for years, meeting the performers creates this strange overlap between fiction and reality.

You look at Bruce Campbell and immediately think:

Chainsaw.

Boomstick.

Deadites.

Then he spends twenty minutes telling you about washing dishes and failing a chicken-commercial audition.

Suddenly the horror icon is just a person who spent years trying to get work.

I love that.

Convention Panels Can Be Better Than Autographs

We enjoy meeting actors and getting autographs.

But if you attend horror conventions, do not skip the panels.

An autograph interaction might last a minute.

Maybe two.

Panels can last an hour.

And everyone gets to hear the stories.

Sometimes people ask questions you've heard a thousand times.

"What's your favorite movie?"

"What's your favorite kill?"

"What was the makeup like?"

Then somebody asks something strange and the entire conversation goes somewhere unexpected.

Those are usually my favorite moments.

Our Kind of Horror Tourism

Trips like this are why I use both dark tourism and horror tourism on the website.

They overlap, but they're not quite the same thing.

Gettysburg is dark tourism.

A haunted historic hotel can be both dark tourism and paranormal tourism.

A horror convention is horror tourism.

We aren't confronting an actual tragedy.

We're celebrating the fictional nightmares people created from makeup, cameras, costumes, scripts, practical effects, and a disturbing amount of fake blood.

And those fictional nightmares become part of our culture.

From Tiny Horror Movie to Generations of Fans

Perhaps the strangest thing about the Evil Dead story is its longevity.

The original movie arrived in 1981.

More than four decades later, people still dress like Ash.

They still buy chainsaw props.

They still quote the movies.

They still line up at conventions to meet Bruce Campbell and Ted Raimi.

Campbell eventually returned to the character in Ash vs Evil Dead, which ran from 2015 through 2018.

That is an incredible life for something that started as a tiny independent horror movie.

Why We Keep Going to Horror Conventions

The vendor rooms are dangerous.

The autograph prices add up.

The lines can be long.

Your feet will hurt.

You will buy something ridiculous.

You will probably carry that ridiculous thing around for the remaining six hours because you refused to walk back to the car.

But I still love horror conventions.

They let us spend a weekend surrounded by people who understand why seeing a possessed Henrietta is exciting.

Nobody thinks you're strange because you're carrying a fake severed head.

Everyone has a favorite horror movie.

Somebody is probably dressed as Ghostface.

And somewhere inside the building, one of the people responsible for your childhood nightmares is sitting behind a table eating lunch.

Final Thoughts

This Bruce Campbell and Ted Raimi panel ended up being exactly why we love horror conventions.

We heard about Evil Dead.

We heard about acting.

We heard about rejection.

We heard about growing up and deciding what kind of life you want.

We learned that successful actors still bomb auditions and destroy meetings.

We learned that Bruce Campbell will apparently hold a grudge over a horse for decades.

And somewhere along the way, a serious horror panel became a discussion about underwear.

Perfect.

Horror conventions give us a chance to celebrate the darker side of movies while also learning how those movies were really made.

Behind every demon is an actor sweating inside makeup.

Behind every cult classic is a crew trying to finish the movie.

Behind every successful career are hundreds of jobs that didn't happen.

And behind Ash Williams is Bruce Campbell, still completely capable of taking over a room full of horror fans with nothing more dangerous than a microphone.

That's our kind of horror tourism.

Stay spooky, cats!