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Klaatu Barada Nikto. What does it mean? Well, not even the biggest Evil Dead fan in the world quite knows, especially now that Ash Williams has declared that we've been saying it wrong ever since it first appeared in the third Evil Dead film, 1992's Army of Darkness. Fortunately, however, Campbell was at Emerald City Comic Con 2025 to clear the whole mess up.

Specifically, Campbell was appearing at the (Popverse hosted!) Dead by Dawn panel, which reunited the actor with fellow face of the franchise Jane Levy. At the end of the discussion, we thought it would be fun to see if Bruce and Jane could use their knowledge of the Sam Raimi-created franchise to correctly spell the ancient mantra, which a shaman tells Campbell's character Ash Williams to use in order to summon magic.

"You're going to get it wrong!" Campbell responded quickly, "You're going to get it wrong. That little card [Campbell indicates the moderator's presentation card] will have it wrong. Give me that."

Of course, you don't say no to the King, so the presentation cards were handed over.

"OK, this is why it's wrong," began Campbell, starting with the first word on the cue card. "Klaatu. There's either one A or two A's [...] You've got two A's for starters here. First word is the first mistake. How am I supposed to remember these words if you keep changing them?"

And changing them we apparently were. The word we thought was "Barada" was also wrong, according to Campbell. 

"It's Verata," claimed the actor, "V-e-r-a-t-a."

Finally, we came to Nikto, the final word on our list. And as Campbell correctly points out, there technically is no correct spelling of the last word in the Army of Darkness spell, as Ash "never gets nikto out". Therefore, the correct pronunciation of the final word, according to Campbell is: "Nik-[unintelligible]."

Look, you watch the video and try spelling that. Oh wait, Bruce already did.

"That should be spelled n-i-k-n-m-p-p-t-t-z-z-z" (Put that on some merch, Studio Canal.)

Now to be fair, I don't know that every last one of you has been getting the famous spell wrong, but in the 33 years of the film's existence, I bet there have been a lot of mis-spell-ings (heh). If you're like me, anyway, this was a bit of a mind-blower.

Next thing you know, it'll turn out that Ash was telling those primitive screwheads about his "broomstick."

In the immortal words of Danny Elfman, "Life's no fun without a good scare." We couldn't agree more, which is why we've cobbled together a couple pieces to send a chill up your spine. Join Popverse as we explore:

• The best horror movies of all time, according to horror aficionado Greg Silber
• The most underrated horror movies from the past couple years
• All the new and upcoming horror movies for 2025 and beyond

And much gore. Er, more. Much more.