Cheryl Williams was the daughter of Brock and Caroline Williams, and the younger sister of Ash Williams. An aspiring artist, Cheryl accompanied her brother and his friends on a trip to a remote cabin in the woods in October of 1982, a trip which ultimately led to her demise following an encounter with an ancient demonic spirit and her transformation into a Deadite.
Cheryl Williams first appeared in the 1981 film The Evil Dead, portrayed by Ellen Sandweiss.
Biography[]
Early Life[]
Cheryl was born sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s to father Brock Williams, mother Caroline Williams, and raised in the town of Elk Grove, Michigan. Though details are scarce on Cheryl's formative years, she and her older brother Ashley were eventually raised alone by their father after Caroline's departure from the family sometime after Cheryl's birth. It was during Cheryl's childhood that she and her brother would fight and argue whenever they would try to play together, which only added to their father's stresses of raising two children on his own.[1]
At some point during Cheryl's teenage years, she began having a romantic affair with Ash's best friend Chet Kaminski, an affair which was intentionally kept secret from Ash out of fear of damaging his relationship with both Cheryl and Chet.[1] At another unknown point in her adolescence, Cheryl developed aspirations of being an artist.
Events At The Cabin[]
In October of 1982, Cheryl accompanied Ash and a group of his friends (including his girlfriend Linda, his friend Scotty, and Scotty's girlfriend Shelly) on a weekend trip to a remote cabin in the woods. It wouldn't be long after the group's arrival to the cabin that Cheryl began to see and experience strange phenomena while sitting alone inside the living room, starting with the sudden stop of an old wooden clock hanging on the opposite wall. Immediately following the clock's abrupt silence, Cheryl's hand began to move on its own, drawing a square with a ghoulish face on her sketchpad. Sitting in frightened silence, the third and final unexplained occurrence Cheryl witnessed was the sudden banging and shaking of the trap door leading into the cabin's fruit cellar. Though Cheryl had tried to tell the others about these strange events, she was only met with ridicule, especially from Scotty.
Cheryl's concerns about the mystery of the fruit cellar only amplified a short time later, when the cellar door suddenly threw itself open as everyone in the group had gathered in the kitchen for dinner. Ash and Scotty ventured into the cellar, retrieving the personal belongings of Professor Raymond Knowby and bringing them back upstairs for the group to examine. Among Knowby's belongings was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which detailed the professor's most recent expedition to the ruins of a medieval castle, where he retrieved an ancient tome known as "The Book of The Dead". As the tape continued to play, Knowby's phonetic translations of the Book of The Dead's passages began, which frightened the already-unsettled Cheryl to the point of her begging and yelling for Ash and Scotty to turn the recorder off. Only after a tree branch smashed into the cabin's window and Cheryl ran off to one of the bedrooms did anyone finally shut off the recorder.
Unbeknownst to the group, the passage spoken aloud by Knowby was in fact a demon resurrection passage, successfully awakening a malicious spirit within the forest surrounding the cabin. Not long after the incident with the tape recorder, the invisible demon observed Cheryl through the bedroom window, beckoning her to "join us..." with its deep, echoing voice. Cheryl exited the cabin and ventured out into the dark woods, speaking to this unknown voice all the while. Suddenly, the sound of branches breaking and trees twisting echoed through the woods as the unseen spirit began to manipulate the forest around her. Branches and roots slithered out from the dark and coiled around Cheryl's legs and wrists, ripping away at her clothing as the demon used the plants to violate the girl. Managing to break free from the hold of the vines, a disheveled Cheryl managed to run back to the safety of the cabin, trying to explain to Ash that it was the woods themselves that assaulted her. Cheryl pleaded with Ash to get her way from there, with Ash reluctantly agreeing to drive her to a hotel in the closest town for the night. As the two departed the cabin, their trip was short-lived, as they soon discovered the automobile bridge across the river had been destroyed.
Forced to return to the cabin, Ash picked up the tape recorder and continued to listen to Professor Knowby's recording, hearing as the archeologist reveal that his wife had become possessed by a demon that could only be stopped by bodily dismemberment. At that same moment, Linda and Shelly were playing with a deck of playing cards, with Linda trying to guess the suit and number of each card without looking at it. Though Linda was unsuccessfully guessing the cards, Cheryl (who had her back turned to the group, looking out a nearby window) slowly began to accurately state the suite and number of the cards in Shelly's hand before suddenly turning around to reveal her pure white eyes. Shelly and Linda quickly scrambled to get away from Cheryl, who began to float in midair as a deep, demonic voice escaped from her mouth, claiming that "one by one we will take you..." before abruptly collapsing to the floor, seemingly unconscious. Ash and Linda hesitantly approached, only for the possessed Cheryl to suddenly spring up and stab Linda's ankle with a pencil. As Cheryl got up and slowly staggered towards Ash, Scotty jumped into action, bashing Cheryl in the face with the handle of an axe and delivering a swift kick, knocking her into the open cellar door. Kneeling on top of the trap door, Scotty quickly fastened the chains and lock, trapping Cheryl below.
Watching from the narrow space between the cellar door and the floor, Cheryl would growl and grunt at those she once called friends throughout the night as one by one they fell victim to possession from the demonic spirits that had also claimed her own soul until only Ash remained. It was while Ash was dealing with the possessed Linda outside of the cabin that the Deadite Cheryl managed to break free from the cellar, prompting Ash to hunt her down once he realized she had escaped from her underground prison. After Ash had retrieved a box of shotgun shells from the cellar, Cheryl resumed her attack on her brother once more, with her hands breaking through the front door of the cabin and strangling Ash after he had braced himself against it to prevent her reentry. Following an attack from the possessed Scotty, Cheryl managed to break back into the cabin, and began to beat Ash with a fire poker while Scotty tried to pull and claw at Ash's leg. During this fight, Ash realized that these monsters were connected to the Book of The Dead, which had caught fire sometime during their skirmish. Using a necklace he gave Linda just a few hours prior, Ash managed to grab the book and toss it directly into the fireplace, causing both Cheryl and Scotty to cease their attack and collapse into soft piles of flesh upon the floor.[2]
Aftermath[]
After escaping the horrors of the cabin, Ash returned to Elk Grove, where he was forced to tell his father about Cheryl's demise. With an already unstable relationship, it was Brock's anger at the loss of his only daughter which ultimately totally severed his relationship with Ash, prompting Ash to become an exile from his hometown as the story of his deeds at the cabin became wide-spread throughout their community.[3]
Resurrection[]
More than 30 years since the incident at the cabin, Ash was eventually forced to return to Elk Grove at the behest of a woman named Ruby, who needed his assistance in destroying her Demon Spawn and battling her former lover Baal. Ash's return saw him reuniting with his father, reconnecting with Chet Kaminski, and returning to his childhood homestead. After an incident involving a Deadite attack at the Elk Lounge Bar had become misconstrued by the public, Ash and his cohorts were forced to take refuge inside the old Williams house as an angry mob gathered outside. With Ash trapped inside, the same demonic force which had attacked Cheryl over three decades prior barged into the home and "grew" a new Cheryl. This new version of Cheryl appeared much older than she did during the events at the cabin, as if she had aged in real time had her death not occurred, and seemed to possess all of Cheryl's memories prior and up to her fateful trip. Cheryl encountered Ash and Chet inside the house, just outside of her old bedroom, asking Ash what was going on. Though Ash was initially confused by the sight of his long-dead sister, he soon confronted her with the harsh fact of her death at the cabin 30 years ago, which prompted Cheryl to drop her deception and reveal her true Deadite nature.
The battle between brother and sister moved from room to room across the house, eventually leading downstairs to the kitchen. While Ash had told Chet to remain upstairs while he dealt with Cheryl, Kaminski had come down into the kitchen at the most inopportune time to grab a beer, at a moment in which Cheryl had disappeared from Ash's sight. Suddenly, Cheryl appeared behind Chet, using him as a human shield to protect herself from Ash's attacks. Realizing that Ash wouldn't shoot at Chet, Cheryl decided to kill Kaminski where he stood, ripping his heart right out of his chest. With shotgun in hand, Ash blasted Cheryl out of the house and through the front door, sending her out towards the mob gathered outside. The crowd watched as Ash continued to shoot her, forcing the Deadite to reveal her demonic nature after getting up several times from his blasts. Eventually trapping Cheryl in the trunk of a car, Ash decapitated the Deadite with his chainsaw, seemingly ending Cheryl's return for good.[1]
Legacy[]
Not long after the battle with Cheryl at the Williams home, Ash went back in time to 1982 in an effort to prevent his younger-self from finding the Necronomicon at the cabin in the first place, which eventually led to a confrontation with the shape-shifting demon Baal. During the skirmish with Ash, Baal used his power to briefly take the form of Cheryl, attacking Ash with a copy of his chainsaw.[4]
After defeating Baal in 1982 and returning to the 21st Century, Ash was honored by the town of Elk Grove with a large party as a way for the townsfolk to apologize, as well as a way to honor him for destroying the demons which had threatened them. As Ash looked out from the stage, he saw the ghostly spirits of Cheryl, Brock, and Chet standing in the crowd, seemingly implying that their spirits were finally at peace.[4]
In Other Media[]
Evil Dead (2013)[]
- Audio of Cheryl's lines from The Evil Dead are used at several points in Fede Alvarez's 2013 film Evil Dead.
Live Events[]
- Cheryl appeared exclusively at the Hollywood version of the Ash vs Evil Dead haunted house attraction during Universal Studio's Halloween Horror Nights event in 2017, appearing in a scene based the fight sequence between her and Ash from the Ash vs Evil Dead Season Two episode Trapped Inside.
Video Games[]
- Cheryl is indirectly mentioned by Ash during dialog in the 2013 video game Poker Night 2, simply referenced as his dead sister.
- Cheryl is indirectly mentioned by Ash during dialog in the "Fistful of Fun" mission in the Family Guy: The Quest For Stuff mobile game, although she is referred to as Ash's "girlfriend's friend" and not as his sister.
Gallery[]
The Evil Dead[]
Promotional Images[]
Ash vs Evil Dead[]
Trivia[]
- Cheryl's Within The Woods counterpart is Ellen, though unlike Ellen in Within The Woods, Cheryl does not survive.
- Cheryl's character is heavily referenced by Mia Allen from Evil Dead (2013) and Ellie from Evil Dead Rise. All three are sisters to another character in their respective films, all display some sort of artistic talent, and all three become Deadites that are trapped or locked out of their respective film's main setting.
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Ash vs Evil Dead: Trapped Inside (Season 2, Episode 6) (2016)
- ↑ The Evil Dead (1981)
- ↑ Ash vs Evil Dead: Last Call (Season 2, Episode 3) (2016)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Ash vs Evil Dead: Second Coming (Season 2, Episode 10) (2016)