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Ashley "Ash" Joanna Williams is a fictional character and the protagonist of the Evil Dead franchise. Created by Sam Raimi, he is portrayed by Bruce Campbell and is the only character to appear in each entry of the series, including a post-credits cameo in the soft reboot film. Throughout the series, Ash faces off against "Deadites", evil creatures possessed by the ancient evil of the Kandarian Demon. In 2008, Ash was selected by Empire magazine as the 24th greatest movie character of all time, and in 2013, was voted by Empire as the greatest horror movie character ever.
In The Evil Dead, Ash and his girlfriend Linda, sister Cheryl, and friends Scott and Shelly stay at a log cabin in the woods, where they find the "Naturom Demonto" (renamed or possibly translated to Necronomicon Ex-Mortis in the sequels), a Sumerian Book of the Dead, along with a tape recorder. The tape is a recording made by the cabin's owner Professor Knowby, who was translating a passage of the book. By playing the tape, the group unknowingly awaken the Kandarian Demon (the titular "Evil Dead") which can possess the living. They are possessed and killed one by one, until only Ash remains. He finally destroys the Book of the Dead by throwing it in the fireplace, and in doing so causes the possessed bodies of Scott and Cheryl to rapidly decay and "die". The film ends with Ash being suddenly attacked by the evil force (originally intended to portray his death).
In Evil Dead II, in an alternate recap of the previous film, only Ash and Linda are shown on the trip to the cabin. Picking up from the ending of the first film, Ash is carried off by the demonic force and briefly possessed, released from the spirit by the light of dawn and falling unconscious. Attempting to leave, Ash finds the only bridge out completely destroyed and is forced to spend another night in the cabin. As the evil force toys with Ash's mind, his right hand becomes possessed and he cuts it off at the wrist with his chainsaw.
Later, the cabin owner's daughter, Annie Knowby, and three others arrive to discover what became of Professor Knowby. Despite banding together in an attempt to survive, the others are killed off leaving only Ash and Annie. To better fight the deadites, Ash affixes the chainsaw in place of his right hand and wields a "boomstick" to match. Annie reads passages from the Necronomicon, first to force the Kandarian Demon to manifest physically, and then opening a space-time vortex to banish the now-corporeal demonic spirit. However, Annie is stabbed by Ash's possessed disembodied hand; succumbing to her wound, she is unable to close the vortex after the entity is sucked away. Ash is sucked into the vortex after the entity and sent back in time to 1300 AD Europe. After saving a group of knights from an attacking deadite, he is hailed as the hero "who has come from the sky"; Ash can only scream in anguish at his situation.
In Army of Darkness, after being accidentally transported to medieval Europe, Ash must retrieve the Necronomicon so he can return home. Using his knowledge of modern technology, Ash constructs a mechanical prosthetic hand out of a gauntlet from a suit of armor. Bungling the magic words that will allow him to safely retrieve it, Ash unleashes an army of the dead led by his monstrous doppelganger "Bad Ash". After leading the medieval soldiers to victory, Ash is given a potion that will allow him to sleep until his own time. Back in the present, Ash returns to his job as a sales clerk at S-Mart; when the store is attacked by a deadite, he kills it and is again hailed as a hero.
In the original ending, a distracted Ash drinks one drop too many from the potion, awakening instead in post-apocalyptic London. The film then cuts to black as his insane laughter is heard.
In the Evil Dead remake, Ash makes an appearance in a post-credits scene, in which he says his signature catchphrase, "Groovy".
In the television series Ash vs. Evil Dead, an older Ash appears as the main character in Ash vs Evil Dead, a horror comedy series for Starz. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Campbell stated, "Ash has survivor's guilt. You could have a heyday with his PTSD. He's a war vet. He doesn't want to talk about it, and he'll lie about that stump on his hand to impress the ladies. This is a guy who's got some issues. He's emotionally stunted. But he's the guy you want in the foxhole next to you."
In season 1, In an attempt to impress a date, Ash accidentally releases the Kandarian Demon by reading from the Necronomicon while intoxicated. His former coworkers Pablo Bolivar and Kelly Maxwell join forces with him after their encounters with the Evil Dead. Ash eventually discovers that the key to dispelling the evil is returning the book to the cabin and bury it within its grounds.
At the cabin, the group is confronted by Ruby, an ancient being and the original author of Necronomicon. Ruby offers Ash a compromise: if he allows her to release her demonic children as well as lord over them, then she will not only spare Pablo and Kelly but also fulfill his dream of living a normal life with his friends in Jacksonville, Florida. Ash accepts, delighting in the idea of finally living a normal quiet life. As the trio drive off, a radio broadcast reveals mysterious sinkholes are erupting across the country.
In season 2, Ash's partying in Jacksonville is cut short when deadites show up. Declaring that Ruby has sent them, one calls him "Ashy Slashy". It is revealed that, after escaping from the cabin Ash had returned home, only for no one to believe him about the deadites. Instead believing that Ash had killed his sister and friends, they gave him the nickname "Ashy Slashy" and drove him out of town. Returning to Elk Grove to search for Ruby, Ash is reunited with his estranged father Brock who disowned him after Cheryl's death.
Ruby reveals that her children have betrayed her and attempted to take possession of the book themselves in order to summon a demon known as Baal; Ash and his friends form an alliance with Ruby to retrieve the Necronomicon and send the demon spawn back to hell. Reclaiming the book and throwing it into a portal to hell, the group unknowingly allows Baal to enter the mortal world.
After awakening in an asylum, Ash is confronted by a doctor (Baal in disguise) who tries to convince Ash that there were no demons but merely "delusions". As time goes on Ash appears to succumb to Baal's attempts, obeying commands to capture his former allies. However, it is revealed that Ash was merely playing along in order to gather the group to return Baal to hell; they succeed but Pablo is killed in the process.
Recalling previous adventures via time travel, Ash theorizes that it may be possible to bring Pablo back from the dead by going back in time to the cabin and preventing his younger self from ever finding the Necronomicon. Taken back into the past by Ruby, the group is confronted by Baal and a younger Ruby; when Ash finally defeats Baal the cabin is set ablaze and sinks into the depths of hell. The trio return to the present and the citizens of Elk Grove throw a parade in Ash's honor. In a grateful speech, Ash declares that he wants to stay in Elk Grove and defend the town if evil ever returns. A post credits scene reveals the Necronomicon on the cabin grounds, left behind by Ash.
In season 3, after the Necronomicon is once again found and read, the Evil Dead makes a return to Elk Grove. Ash reunites with former lover Candace Barr, and learns he has a daughter, Brandy. Ash, Pablo, and Kelly unite against the younger Ruby who plans to kill Ash and turn his long-lost daughter against him. Also introduced are the Knights of Sumeria, an ancient order dedicated to defeating the evil that worship Ash and his destiny to save mankind.
Entering through a dimensional rift, the Dark Ones take revenge on Ruby for imprisoning them millennia ago and reclaim the Necronomicon. With the Dark Ones now in the mortal realm, evil dead are summoned worldwide and a massive creature, Kandar the Destroyer, is unleashed. In Elk Grove, while military forces evacuate citizens, Ash decides to stay behind in order to finally fulfill his destiny of defeating the evil. After saying a heartfelt goodbye to his friends and daughter, Ash commandeers an abandoned tank and fires the Kandarian dagger into the head of Kandar, destroying the evil and saving the world.
Awakening from a coma in the far distant, technologically advanced future, Ash is told that his friends are still alive but that the Dark Ones are on the move. The series ends with Ash saying his iconic line "Groovy" as he embarks on another quest to save the world.
In the 2000s, Bruce Campbell voiced Ash in a trilogy of video games. The first was Evil Dead: Hail to the King released in 2000 on PlayStation, Dreamcast, and Windows. This game continues after Army of Darkness. Ash is dating Jenny, a fellow S-Mart employee. After she convinces him to return to the cabin to face his fears, his severed hand replays the tape and sets the evil loose again. The second game, Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick, released in 2003 on Xbox and PlayStation 2. In this game Ash mentions Jenny died in a bus accident previous to this game. Ash watches TV in a bar in Dearborn, Michigan, where a local TV show, "Mysteries of the Occult," reads the passages from the Necronomicon setting the evil loose and possessing most of the town. The game also features time-travel, including colonial times and the civil war era. The third and final game was Evil Dead: Regeneration, released in 2005 on Xbox, PlayStation 2, and Windows. This game plays through an alternate history: instead of being sucked into the vortex at the end of Evil Dead II, Ash has been placed in a mental institution for the criminally insane. His doctor has gone mad and, having obtained the Necronomicon, releases the deadites once again.
Ash appears in Telltale Games' Poker Night 2. The player participates in a poker tournament against Williams, Sam from Sam & Max, Claptrap from Borderlands, and Brock Samson from The Venture Bros. There is a special conversation in the game where if the player chooses to play in an Evil Dead-inspired room, GLaDOS (the games' dealer) will reveal that Ash is actually Brock's ancestor through time travel as Ash had slept with a woman whose family line Brock is a member of some time during his adventure in Army of Darkness. In another conversation between him and Brock, it is revealed that the store Ash previously worked for, S-Mart, is confirmed to exist in the Venture Bros. universe.
Ash Williams also makes an unofficial appearance as a player character in the run-and-gun platform game Broforce. In keeping with the game's naming convention, he is referred to as "Ash Brolliams".
A leak in the perk selection screen revealed that Ash would be making an appearance in Dead by Daylight. He was later officially announced with a trailer on the 28th of March, and released on April 2nd.
Ash has been announced as a playable character in the upcoming Evil Dead: The Game, appearing alongside characters and locations from throughout the franchise. Williams is portrayed in both his Evil Dead II and Ash vs Evil Dead incarnations.
In 1992, Dark Horse Comics released a three-issue adaptation of Army of Darkness, adapted by John Bolton from Sam and Ivan Raimi's original script.
In 2004, Dynamite Entertainment acquired the rights to produce comics based on the Army of Darkness film, featuring Ash as the main character, starting with a four-issue miniseries titled Army of Darkness: Ashes 2 Ashes released in the fall of 2004. This miniseries later received two sequels (Army of Darkness: Shop 'Till You Drop Dead and Army of Darkness vs. Re-Animator, both released in 2005) which eventually turned into an ongoing series, and later more crossovers (most notably Marvel Zombies vs. The Army of Darkness and Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash from 2007). These comics featured a version of Ash from a world where the events of the Evil Dead films didn't take place until the early 21st century, which was later designated by Marvel Comics as "Earth-818793" as part of their multiverse numbering system. In 2013, Dynamite announced a reboot of their Army of Darkness line titled "Ash And The Army of Darkness", which featured a new version of Ash Williams, one who chose to stay in the Middle Ages following an unexpected return to that time period. This rebooted series ran for eight issues, but was followed-up by two miniseries, Army of Darkness: Ash Gets Hitched, and Army of Darkness Volume 4 (better known as "Ash In Space") in 2014. Dynamite returned to their original "Earth-818793" version of Ash with 2016's Army of Darkness: Furious Road miniseries, but have since gone on to publish more crossovers with other licensed titles that are independent of this continuity (such as KISS/Army of Darkness and Vampirella/Army of Darkness). In 2019, Dynamite launched the crossover miniseries, Army of Darkness/Bubba Ho-Tep, seeing Ash team up with another Bruce Campbell character, Elvis.
In 2016, Space Goat Publishing released Evil Dead 2: Beyond Dead By Dawn, a three-issue series that, much like Dynamite's Army of Darkness books, took the liberty of stating that the events of the first two Evil Dead films took place in the 21st century. The series (and its several sequels and one-shot follow-ups) features a simulacrum clone of Ash Williams as the main character, which was created from the original Ash's right hand by Annie Knowby.