the transgender evil dead

not clickbait this time

When I say transgender horror, you might not think of Evil Dead. Although, if you’re familiar with me and all of my shit, you just might.

Right off, I must admit to my biases. I have written extensively about my interpretation of the Evil Dead series as a transgender one. I’ve even been published by doing so. My crudely edited photo of Bruce Campbell in front of the transgender flag has accidentally become a top Google Image hit for the character of Ash Williams. I can, have, and might continue to yap about this until the end of time.

As a series concerned with possession, loss of personal autonomy, and broad strokes of body horror, Evil Dead lends itself readily to trans interpretation. Cut off your evil limbs, reclaim the evil body. Reinvent yourself to survive.

The cast for Evil Dead Rise was announced way back in June of 2021. I remember exactly where I was, like this was some giant life-changing moment kind of shit. That was back when I was still going to the gym (oh, 2021), and I was checking Twitter in between reps, and there was the announcement. Morgan Davies. A transgender actor. A trans actor in the series that shaped so much of my own trans identity, a trans actor in a film genre that only saw its first explicit FtM character last fucking year. That shit felt like it was my birthday.

Evil Dead, as a series, has undergone a lot of reinvention, and perhaps has never maintained a stable identity outside of a very basic skeleton. ‘Evil book made of skin’ and ‘possessed people’ seems to be the staples that hold the current four films together. Tone, characters, location, and gore are all otherwise different in each iteration. But I would like to posit that Morgan marks growth for this series. Because it’s not, actually, the first time trans people have been involved in the series, nor might it be the first time a trans person has been depicted.

So before/while everybody else rushes in on my turf and while everybody else gets it all wrong, consider my thoughts on the topic! I’m The Transgender Evil Dead Guy for a reason.

Joanie

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A trans character has a deep, gravelly voice. She’s identified as a prostitute or some other kind of sex worker. And she’s dead by the end of the storyline.

If you think you’ve seen this kind of depiction a million times before, then congrats! You can probably skip this episode of Ash vs. Evil Dead and get on with the rest of what’s otherwise a really fun season. Season two does the most Good Stuff, even if it also reminds you that, oh yeah, this is all created by a bunch of old white guys from Michigan. Episode 5 is an example of the latter.

Joanie is a character insofar as she has a name and speaks lines, but she’s also introduced and killed within the same episode, so she’s not exactly three-dimensional. She’s a Girl With Deep Voice joke. A Girl On The Men’s Side Of The Jail joke. Even though, really, the punchline is less on her for being trans, and is more on Ted Raimi for having sex with a tranny. More than once! Joanie gets to crack a few one-liners and linger in the background of a few scenes, before the Deadite of the episode appears and promptly impales her on a bunch of broken glass. The last line ever spoken about her is another prostitution joke: “oh, God, you were so giving!”

Joanie is portrayed by Medulla Oblongata, a ‘post-gender’ drag queen, who, these days, seems to mostly hang out at stage shows or on drag-related reality T.V. They seem perfectly pleasant, by the way. As far as I can find, no one’s ever interviewed them about this role (though I have reached out and am waiting to hear back), and Medulla hasn’t posted about the cameo since ~2017. The Ash vs. Evil Dead boxset is filled with audio commentaries for all episodes of seasons 1 and 3, but not for season 2. Out of 10 episodes, only 6 have commentaries. Episodes 4, 5, 7, and 8 are rather strangely overlooked (this is especially weird considering that episodes 7 and 8 introduced that Ashy Slashy puppet, which is now a very established part of Evil Dead merchandising. What was happening behind the scenes that these four episodes were deemed unworthy of bonus material?)

Nevertheless, Joanie is a footnote in this episode. You can easily describe it without mentioning her at all. In fact, the only contemporary reviews that mention her and her transness specifically come from the TVTropes recap (‘Ambigiously Bi: Chet had solicited a transgender prostitute, but it's not revealed if he's into her or if he was mistaken about her identity’) and Gruesome Magazine. Apathy is probably the best word to describe audience response to Joanie. There was no concentrated debate over whether or not this portrayal was Good Representation or not. That may or may not have something to do with Evil Dead’s target audience primarily being middle-aged dads.

Apathy is sort of where I sit with Joanie, too. It’s not an especially nuanced portrayal, but considering how much further they could have gone, I find it difficult to muster up any ire towards it, either. They gave a trans drag queen some work instead of casting a dude in a wig, so I guess we’ll call it even?

Medulla Oblongata as Joanie, behind the scenes of 'Ash vs. Evil Dead', S2E5

And, as a sort of did you know? bonus fact, this episode was directed by M.J. Bassett, the trans woman responsible for Silent Hill: Revelation, Rogue (the Megan Fox + lion movie from a few years ago) and an upcoming Red Sonja installment. She actually directed four episodes of Ash vs. Evil Dead, two in the first season and then two in the second season. This episode with Joanie was her last episode. Far as I can gather, MJ never had a Public Coming Out moment, but articles about her transness started popping up within a year of this episode airing.

As far as I can find, she has only spoken once, in-depth, about her experience directing an Ash vs. Evil Dead episode, but not since publicly coming out.

Danny

I was going back and forth in what the likelihood of Danny being trans was even when I was already in Austin. Even sitting in the far back of the Paramount.

Because, okay, let’s think about this. Presuppose that Lee Cronin, a 40-something-year-old Irish guy, knows what a transsexual is. Presuppose he knows what a trans man is. Assume he knows what we are, and also that he likes us enough to write a neutral trans character. Assume he wanted to just casually include a trans child. And, I’m sorry, but that’s a whole lot of open field to give a guy who, for all intents and purposes, is Just Some Guy. He seems perfectly nice, but I don’t know him. You also factor in that Raimi & Campbell have not historically been deeply concerned with representation of minorities. I think Ted alone has got, what, three films where he’s in yellow/blackface?

Nevertheless. Evil Dead Rise. If you’re looking for a film review, I’ve got a Patreon for that, but entirely in terms of trans content, I guess I have good news and bad news.

The good news is this: this movie rocks. Morgan Davies is third billed in the ending credits. He is all over this movie as Danny, the oldest brother of two younger sisters, obsessed with vinyl records and turntables and crawling around his old apartment building. He’s a sweet little weirdo, and is somehow/arguably the most normal of his siblings (who include middle-sister Bridgette, the activist who’s mad that her “EAT THE RICH” shirt won’t be clean for her protest tomorrow, and Kassie, the baby we are introduced to by watching her cut the head off of her doll). Morgan looks like he is having the time of his life while filming some of these scenes, especially as the film goes on. Without giving too much away, we’ll just say that I am very jealous of the stuff that he gets to do.

Finally, at last, transgender people are allowed to be Deadites. A tear streaks down my cheek. We have won.

But that’s unfortunately where the bad news comes. There’s no solid piece of textual evidence that gives us a canonically transgender character. And I got a pretty firm no from Morgan’s agent when I emailed asking about the possibility of an interview. Unless or until that changes, or until I’m able to comb over every frame of Danny’s bedroom for any sneakily hidden flags, Joanie is still Evil Dead’s first and only transgender character.

Morgan Davies and Lily Sullivan as Danny and Beth, from Entertainment Weekly

But, hey, I’ve dug trans subtext out of trickier films. And the trans text is pretty much sitting there, waiting for me to talk about it, like it is in every piece of Evil Dead media before.

This is not a spoiler (the trailer and promo material acknowledges this) but Danny is the one who uncovers the Book Of The Dead, and he is the one who unwittingly sets the evil loose in his apartment building. He plays the tapes and bleeds on the book. There is literally a moment in which Bridgette directly tells Danny that this is all his fault. And, well, having a movie about the collapse of a family unit semi-centered around a trans youth feels so topical it’s almost hack, right? Even if that’s totally coincidental. How often have we trans folk brought total chaos into our houses? How often has total ruin been wrought by thrifting some shitty records?

Plus, there’s a whole lot of body horror that I cannot talk about yet, but which is ripe for discussion in terms of this series’ relationship to bodily autonomy. Seriously. Once the curtain lifts in April and I get to talk about the third act of this movie, you’re going to understand exactly what I’m talking about. In so many words, this takes the previous theme of Deadite possession equating to a loss of self and cranks it to, like, fifteen. I will also put a slight pin in the concept of monstrous motherhood and betrayal of the body. This movie is no less trans in its subtext than any other Evil Dead film.

I have many thoughts about whether or not casting a trans* actor “counts” as trans “representation”. I originally described Danny’s gender as “kind of nebulous”, but I only question the character’s gender because I know that Morgan is trans. Do we forever assign trans actors to always playing trans roles and declare it representative? Do we just let screenwriters get off the hook if they don’t have to write trans roles? Do we want to only assign trans actors cis roles because Trans Men Are Men and Trans Women Are Women and Trans People Are Totally Not Unique From Cis People and just completely euthanize any meaningful conversation on how gender functions in a society that operates on binaries and perception?

I dunno. I just like throwing difficult questions out there without any grasp on how to answer them. I think about this shit too hard. I think this every time I watch a trans person in film: are they playing trans? Do I think they’re playing trans just because I know they’re trans, and is it right or wrong of me to think that? And I don’t know what the right answer is!

To put aside and refuse to simplify my weird thoughts on this, I cannot divorce myself from the feeling of elation that comes with seeing (at the risk of sounding fucking corny) a version of myself on a giant screen at the Paramount. I stood outside in a line that stretched around the block for two hours, and I crowded into a giant, two-story theater and watched a trans guy set Deadites on fire. I’ve defined my own transness against this franchise for so long and I did not ever expect to see it reflect this transness back at me. Even if Danny is not trans, Morgan is, and being able to see him and recognize him and project that onto him, like, really genuinely meant something. It’s not gonna save lives, it’s not gonna win awards, it just makes me happy.

I feel like I should be ending this with some profound thoughts about the future of the genre or something, but I don’t exactly have much else. I have done all I can think to do to try and talk to Morgan directly, but ‘transgender horror historian’ doesn’t seem to be getting me anywhere. Jury’s out on whether or not I hear back from Medulla. So I’m kind of stuck where I am for most of these movies: assumptions and extrapolations and trying to scrounge whatever scraps I can find.

Is Evil Dead gonna become the new hangout franchise for the dolls and transfags? I mean, it already is. That’s just a statement of fact. The transsexuals have claimed Ash as one of us and we are not giving him back. But, textually, not likely. I think we have a better chance at getting into Don Mancini’s weird little bungalow than we do breaking into Raimi’s semi-exclusive condo.

Who knows though? Evil Dead has long been formulaic, but rarely predictable. More films are being planned. Halloween doesn’t have any trans women. Scream is doll-less. Elm Street and Friday the 13th are ghost towns for genderqueers. Only Child’s Play has had a textually transgender character in its films, albeit voiced by a guy from Lord of the Rings. We can fight about whether or not Hellraiser counts.

Ultimately, we are still waiting for that big, blockbuster horror film to have a trans character played by a trans actor. I am still waiting. But until we get there, just seeing another trans face is an acceptable feeling. Evil Dead is already doing so much more than any other major franchise. It’s only upwards from here.

Cc: Sam Raimi: Maim more transsexuals!

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