FX Legend Tony Gardner Looks Back at Creating ‘Evil Dead II’s Massive Final Deadite

Few endings in horror are as gloriously over-the-top as the finale of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II. After battling Deadites inside the cabin, Bruce Campbell‘s Ash Williams comes face-to-face with a massive, grotesque creature that crashes through the doorway before ultimately sending him hurtling through time to set up Army of Darkness.

Now, special effects legend Tony Gardner is pulling back the curtain on how that unforgettable sequence came together.

Appearing on the Flesh & Blood & Bone podcast, Gardner, whose career has included makeup and creature effects work on films such as Army of Darkness, Hocus Pocus, Seed of Chucky, Darkman, Zombieland, and countless others, recalled joining the production to help bring the enormous Deadite to life.

“When it was time to shoot the live-action stuff, the big tree branch and Rotten Applehead, Mike Burnett and I went down to location,” Gardner said. “The cabin set was built in the gymnasium of a closed-down school.”

The practical effects setup was every bit as elaborate as it appears on screen.

According to Gardner, the giant Deadite’s arm was mounted to a massive welded aluminum platform that required multiple puppeteers just to operate. Different crew members controlled the fingers, wrist, and other moving parts while the effects team coordinated everything together.

“The big tree arm took like two people to roll it in,” Gardner explained. “It was on this big welded aluminum platform, and then people had to pull these levers to make the fingers bend, and then you could rotate the wrist. Somebody else had to do that. So the hand by itself took everyone.”

Once the creature smashed through the cabin doorway, the team focused on selling the illusion.

“After it pushed in through the doorway, we could kind of lock it in place, and we did all this sort of tendony stuff to kind of goop it into the door.”

Gardner said he and primarily operated the creature’s expressive face.