On October 15, 1981, fledgling director Sam Raimi unleashed his seminal gore opera The Evil Dead. The premise was: a base-under-siege masterpiece where a cabin of plucky kids succumb to the ultra-violent possession of the Necronomicon.

At its gore-soaked centre, Ash, played by Bruce Campbell, emerged as the chainsaw-wielding sole survivor and Deadite slayer. From the start, it was permeated with wince-inducing violence, schlock-shock set pieces, and body parts abounding in every bloody frame.

A sequel followed in 1987, Evil Dead II, during the Video Nasty era, when Draconian censorship laws had horror titles banned for extreme content. The at-the-time concluding chapter, Army of Darkness, arrived in 1992, a departure from what came before, incorporating time travel and historical settings, and elevating Ash to a messianic figure. Raimi’s world-building adopted a Romero-esque blueprint laced with the acidic Grand Guignol of Michele Soavi: rapid-fire gore, bone-crunching brutality, and heckling Deadites that transformed straightforward storytelling into an ongoing cult mythology.

The franchise has endured for over 40 years – Fede Alvarez’s 2013 reboot, Lee Cronin’s Lamberto Bava-informed Evil Dead Rise a decade later. Next on the Deadite chopping block: Sébastien Vaniček’s Evil Dead Burn, slated for a summer release.

The brief trailer is fueled by panic-inducing terror: with a soundtrack defined by fractured dissonance, visceral immediacy in each frame and a dread-expectancy ubiquitous to this franchise. The trailer also suggests a loose connection to Starz Ash Vs. The Evil Dead, (more on this later) when the franchise expanded into the world of television, ran for three seasons (from 2015 to 2018) with original star Bruce Campbell reprising his role as Ash and Lucy Lawless (Xena: Warrior Princess) portraying the multifaceted triple threat Ruby.

The show was a wicked road-trip into a Deadite-dominated hell, featuring killer puppets, giant demons, witty dialogue, Ash’s trademark sleaze and a body count so high it made The Necronomicon come over with girlish glee. Although well-received and loved by horror fans, the show didn’t become a ratings hit, resulting in its cancellation after three seasons.

One of the highlights of the spin-off series was Ruby Knowby (Lucy Lawless). When she entered the Evil Dead domain, the character rewrote all the rules and queered the bloodcurdling franchise.

Introduced in the show’s first season as a mysterious ally (or was she?) to Ash, the character was purposely opaque and unknowable. With limited screen time during the first year, the short episodes enabled her to stalk the narrative, like a net closing in on our triumvirate of would-be heroes.

Unlike its cinematic predecessors, with Lawless, the show offered us something unique: it gave the permeating Evil a face and great hair. Here was a tangible enemy, finally a worthy foil to Ash Williams and his war on the Deadites.

Lawless would play three variations of the same character, retconned in each season. Let’s unpack Ruby’s evolution – and devolution.

In Season One, the character appeared as a mysterious ally to Ash Williams. A large chunk of the show’s real estate during the first year was devoted to Ash reinstating himself as a killer of demons, the focus shifting to standalone episodes and establishing additional characters.

Ruby was a woman in transit, alone and observing. Forming an alliance with a cop on Ash’s tail, Amanda (Jill Marie Jones), Ruby led viewers to believe she was the sole survivor of her family’s massacre. Ruby’s flirtation with Amanda indicated Ruby was pansexual – and her feelings seemed authentic.

Of course, we quickly found out Ruby’s world was a tad off-kilter, her skills a bit more-than-human. Her infernal resurrection confirmed those suspicions and, of course, the later revelation of her connection to the underlying mythology and The Book of the Dead.

Yet, despite this, Ruby was a character who appeared defined by a moral ambiguity – until the stand-off in the finale when she struck a deal with Ash. Apparently, she’d been tracking Ash for decades, reclaiming the Necronomicon was what fueled her pursuit.

This rug-pull Ruby was not a garden-variety Deadite, but a Dark One and the author of the Book of the Dead. This was a reveal nobody saw coming.

When we catch up with Ruby in the next season, she has been retconned. Now ageing and powerless, Ruby has been stripped of power and is being hunted by her monster children. This puts her in a precarious position, and she reluctantly forms an alliance with Ash and The Ghost Beaters, Kelly (Dana DeLorenzo) and Pablo (Ray Santiago).

The show introduced a redemption arc, and we followed the character uneasily, starting to embrace her burgeoning humanity and her bittersweet bond with Kelly. There are moments of will-they-won’t-they between the two women throughout the season. Ultimately, nothing came of it, but it created a dynamic and gave fans some of the show’s best scenes.

Season Two is the strongest season of the show. It fleshed out Ash’s origin story, his unwelcome return to Elk Wood, his hometown. Lawless channelled her most famous character, Xena’s badassery, with her indoctrination into the anti-heroic group.

The season culminated in a time-travel trip to the original cabin – and a fatal interaction with Ruby’s past blonde, leather-clad incarnation. This would lead to another retcon of the character.

Which brings us to the final incarnation of Ruby Knowby – a woman who revels in unadulterated evil and has no redeeming features whatsoever. This would prove to be Lawless’s final outing as Ruby, with the cabin incarnation from the Season Two finale reemerging right as Ash is hailed a hero by the townsfolk.

Ruby has taken on the role of school principal Rebecca Prevett and has Ash’s (unknown to him) daughter, Brandy (Arielle Carver-O’Neill), in her crosshairs. This version of Ruby is a lesson in demonic code-switching: a redemptive human antihero to an iconic evil.

Ruby would become The Big Bad Ash Vs. The Evil Dead needed for its final season. Even by The Evil Dead‘s standards, this incarnation of the character was effectively malevolent, rivalling much of the evil in the franchise’s history. She even had a frenemy/former girlfriend, Kaya, who she released from The Book to take up residence in a dead body.

In the show, Lawless (and Sam Raimi) remixed a classic archetype in a brand-new way. The kind of role inhabited by women in demon/witch fairytales and pop culture is frequently villainous. The demonic seductress has manifested in multiple iterations throughout history, with the woman as a monstrous other image rooted in the storybook tales of The Brothers Grimm.

Recent examples of this trope are exemplified in the cinema of Dario Argento’s Suspiria’s The Mother of Sighs. Mario Bava’s Black Sunday has a soul-sucking seductress who feeds off youth, Alice in Blood on Satan’s Claw disguises her corruption behind a youthful demeanour, and the crux of Snow White‘s narrative is a sorceress driven to murderous extremes as the prospect of getting older.

By taking on a surfeit of topics, Ash Vs The Evil Dead allowed Ruby to straddle two distinct archetypal camps during its run: of a newly-innocent human who refuses to stray back onto an old path and the malevolent woman hellbent on chaos. The show subverted this trope by affording Ruby autonomy and not subjecting her to a one-note agent of demonic chaos.

The demon seductress/witch of folklore is considerably more single-minded. Ruby’s creation is not so much a reinvention of a trope, as much as it is the evolution of a character escaping the stock parameters of outdated feminine monstrosity. Instead, we got a layered CEO of Hell, a corrupter of innocent teenagers, a grieving mother, a queer action hero, and an anti-hero.

Which brings us back to the Evil Dead Burn trailer and the horror unfolding in a familiar setting (Ruby’s house), implying continuity with the TV/film series. Could characters return? We never got clarity on what happened to Ruby – banished to The Deadlands? Can a Dark One even die?

Ruby was the first character who could rival Ash. The first character to be unapologetically queer/pansexual. Her evil incarnation didn’t achieve her nefarious goals when the show ended.

But this is the Evil Dead, and maybe a taint of Ruby remains. We can hope.