Meanwhile, Knowby's daughter Annie is on her way to the cabin with more pages from the Book of the Dead where she thinks her parents are doing research. Well it is nighttime, and since that is when the evil dead are active they immediately begin to make Ash's life a living hell. Those spoken words do their work, and the evil dead are brought back to this world.
Once brought to life they can apparently manipulate objects and possess people at will, in search of a way back into this world via possession and a way to harvest souls for hell. On the tape Knowby speaks aloud the words that are supposed to resurrect the evil dead - those evil spirits that inhabit the forest and world around us. We know this because Ash finds the tape recorder and plays Knowby's entries.
The cabin is actually where Professor Knowby brought the recently discovered Book of the Dead. He says they'll just claim to have gotten lost in the woods if they show up. It's a cabin that Ash knows about, but says he does not know the owners, thus he really doesn't know their whereabouts. The film starts with Ash and girlfriend Linda taking a romantic weekend trip to a cabin. Let me just say that if you haven't seen the first one the second one fills in enough details that you know what is going on. From reading other comments apparently history has been rewritten in relation to the first, but I can't speak to that. but has thoroughly enjoyed the second one since it came out in 1987.
