Necronomicon - Evil Dead 2 Inspired

ShiftySamurai

New Member
I decided to take on a bit of a more complicated build than the 3D printed or epoxy clay things I have done in the past. The Necronomicon has always been something I wanted, but have never thought to make. I’ve never made a book, sculpted clay, created molds, used latex, or painted latex, so everything about this build was going to be new for me.

I decided to start with the pages. I never thought about recreating them by hand, and I found a website that had the pages from Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, and what they called “The Lost Pages”. I decided to use the ones from Evil Dead 2 and the Lost Pages. I printed them on coffee stained paper using a laser printer from work (don’t tell them, I used a fair bit of red toner).

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After printing out the pages, I got to work on aging them. I wanted these pages to be super dirty, as the book is over 1,000 years old and I doubt it’s been super well taken care of. Unfortunately, aging the paper made the paper stack about 10 times larger than it was, so I put 4 Walking Dead Omnibuses on top of them to try to flatten them back out some.

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This is where I bound the pages together in signatures. I didn’t know the correct page order, so I guessed. I neglected to take any photos of the bound pages because I started work on sculpting the cover out of wax based clay.

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It’s missing a lot of the texture of the real book, and an ear, but I was happy with where it was heading. I continued working on the sculpt, and then dropped some plaster over the top, after leaving it alone for an hour I came back to try to remove the plaster and was left with this.

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This is when I opened all the windows in my office, turned on a bunch of fans, and started laying down latex. Following the directions (a mistake) left me spending the next 8 hours laying down as thin of layers as I could. I was left with this:

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I purchased some Monster Makers latex mask paints, and after some trial and error, I ended up with a paint job that I WAS happy with, but now I feel is a bit too orange and not nearly brown enough.

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Before I took a picture, I glued the latex cover to a double stacked sandwich of comic book acid free backing boards that I cut down to size.

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A little wood glue between the paper and some CA glue for the paper to latex, and I had bound the inner cover with paper.

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I wasn’t sure how to connect the cover to the bound pages, so I used some more wood glue and weight. It’s probably not super strong, but I’m happy with how it turned out.

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This looks great! Years and years ago I had a latex cover and bound it to a large journal and weathered the pages much as you did. I then tried to ink each page BY. HAND. I think I gave up after 4 or 5 pages.
 
I didn’t know the correct page order, so I guessed.
that's probably the easiest way to complete it, since few will ever know. there is a shot in one of the movies (i think Army of Darkness montage at the start where he explains it was "never meant for the world of the living") where it is shown flicking through the all pages, but i don't know how useful that would have been. i think the pages have been expanded on in Ash vs Evil Dead series.
Anyway. it's a cool prop and that cover looks fabulous.

my replica props from AOD. these are in the oldsmobile's trunk.
 
It's an old thread, but I recently (2022) shipped my Necronomicon to a friend who was doing filming and interviews at SDCC and he was able to get my book signed by Bruce Campbell, Dana Delorenzo, and Ted Raimi. Unfortunately, Ray Santiago had left for the day.

I was almost a little annoyed that Dana took the whole page, but I was more than happy with the message she wrote.

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