There are few franchises, horror or otherwise, as accommodating to wildly different creative voices as Evil Dead. Ever since Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell proved the series could survive - and even thrive - without endlessly repeating itself, each new entry since the two founding fathers bowed out has become an opportunity for another filmmaker to drag the Necronomicon somewhere unexpected.
After Fede Álvarez delivered a gloriously bloodsoaked reboot in 2013 and Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise rebirthed the franchise once again a decade later, handing the keys over to French director Sébastien Vaniček felt like an inspired decision. If you’ve seen what he accomplished with his wonderfully nasty debut Infested, you already know the man isn’t interested in pulling punches. Evil Dead Burn certainly doesn’t.
This is once again an exceptionally mean, bleak, and unapologetically cruel film that fully embraces the dark of its subject matter. Results may vary, but for viewers that can find the macabre sense of glee that’s mixed into the horrifically gory proceedings, Vaniček’s vision of a Deadite massacre fits squarely alongside its cinematic brethren. Viewer discretion is extremely advised.
Evil Dead Burn wastes absolutely no time letting everyone know what’s up. The film’s opening salvo follows a pair of unsuspecting fishermen who discover something horrifying lurking beneath a quiet lake, leading into violence that’s as brutal as anything the series has delivered before transitioning into one of my favorite smash cuts in recent memory. It’s an audacious start that immediately grabs your attention and announces its intentions.
From there, Burn roots its horror inside a dysfunctional relationship and an even more dysfunctional family that has already been tearing themselves apart long before demonic possession enters the picture. At the center of it all is Alice (Souheila Yacoub), who becomes our reluctant protagonist after a disastrous public argument with her husband, Will (George Pullar), ends with him unknowingly crossing paths with the evil unleashed during the opening sequence. His horrifying death sends Alice into an exceptionally uncomfortable family reunion where grief, resentment, guilt, and decades of buried problems are already boiling over before anyone starts vomiting black blood. Watching Will’s mother, Susan, (Tandi Wright) commit the movie sin of declaring she’d give anything to have her son back becomes the emotional fuse that ignites everything else.
Following Will’s untimely funeral, Alice and the in-laws gather at the lake house where the young promising couple first got married. Of course, an especially demonic presence already awaits them there, and long-held nightmares begin to take shape in the most fantastically horrific ways. For those seeking relentless onscreen carnage, consider yourself sold on this latest iteration of the insanity of the Evil Dead.
This is a family drama pushed to its most extreme breaking point, with the added thorn being the fact that Alice is the only one to not be related by blood. Will’s parents, Susan and Edgar (Erroll Shand), appear to be both standoffish and ignorant of the problems their son’s marriage was facing. Will’s cognitively-declining great grandmother Polly (Maude Davey) requires constant care, and the only one in the family who appears to have any sense of “normalcy” about them is his younger brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and his girlfriend, Thya (Luciane Buchanan). Poor, poor Thya - now there’s an example of a character in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Much like Evil Dead Rise, Vaniček wisely fills the cast with relatively unfamiliar faces for American audiences, allowing everyone and their difficult relationships to each other feel more authentic instead of relying on recognizable star power to carry things through. Susan, played with wonderfully layered complexity by the talented Tandi Wright (Pearl, Love and Monsters) emerges as the film’s most interesting character, while Alice and Joe eventually become the only people capable of maintaining enough composure to even attempt surviving the increasingly impossible nightmare unfolding around them.
Of course, survival quickly becomes secondary to watching Vaniček invent increasingly demented ways to mutilate his cast. Household objects become instruments of unimaginable violence with the same playful creativity Raimi once applied to slapstick. Fishing line, fountain pens, corkscrews, dishwashers, car headrests, and just about anything within arm’s reach gets transformed into something lethally inventive. The franchise has always excelled at making ordinary spaces feel terrifying, and Burn, for lack of a better term, certainly understood the assignment.
What surprised me most wasn’t the quantity of gore, but the filmmaking style surrounding it. The frantic editing by Maxime Caro never sacrifices visual clarity, the swooping overhead forest shots lovingly echo Raimi’s originals without feeling like empty nostalgia, and the cinematography from Philip Lozano (go check out the excellently scary MadS) is simply phenomenal. Reds and deep blacks dominate the frame, producing several genuinely gorgeous images despite the overwhelming ugliness occurring within them. There’s one bathroom sequence in particular whose composition alone deserves to be studied by any and all horror fans.
The pounding score delivered by the joint efforts of Double Danger, Xavier Caux and Douglass Cavanna, only amplifies that sense of relentless dread, turning every encounter into something that genuinely feels life-threatening yet exciting from the safety of a theater seat. That’s another thing Burn understands exceptionally well about this series: Deadites should actually be trying to kill their victims.
That sounds obvious, but too many modern horror franchises eventually end up softening their monsters into joke delivery systems. Here, every possessed family member feels terrifyingly committed to inflicting maximum suffering. Even after the film shoots for easy upsets by introducing a family dog, it somehow becomes even crueler by (mild spoilers for dog lovers) killing it, and then bringing it back only to kill it again. It’s an outrageous moment that perfectly encapsulates what has been Vaniček’s horror philosophy since his first feature. Nothing is sacred, nobody is safe, and there is almost little, if any, light to be found anywhere inside this story.
There are, of course, some far more frustrating aspects of the movie that holds it back from truly unhinged horror greatness. A weak MacGuffin drives important portions of the narrative, Alice’s late-game one-liners rarely land, and the climactic CGI-heavy confrontation lacks the visceral impact of nearly everything preceding it. Even stranger are a pair of post-credit scenes that feel largely disconnected from the film itself, seemingly added to satisfy franchise obligations rather than serve anything within Vaniček’s standalone story.
Those kinds of franchise connections wind up being among the least interesting aspects of the entire experience. Evil Dead has never thrived because of interconnected lore or cameos - it thrives because talented horror filmmakers are given permission to get wild and weird in ways that push all the right buttons. Thankfully, that is by and large what Vaniček is allowed to do with Evil Dead Burns.
There’s obvious DNA here from New French Extremity along the lines of Gaspar Noé and Lars Von Trier, but its Raimi’s gruesomely gleeful slapstick energy that established the franchise in the first place, and it's still alive and well here if you know where to look. Even when individual ideas don’t fully land, they’re constantly replaced by another inspired visual, another outrageous act of violence, or another horror action sequence that’s executed with astonishing confidence.
While I still think Evil Dead Rise remains the stronger overall film of the 2020’s take on this series, Evil Dead Burn stands comfortably alongside it as another boldly ferocious reinvention instead of a lame nostalgic retread. It’s flawed, undeniably, but those shortcomings are largely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of morbid imagination on display.
One spectacularly gnarly chunk of horror, Evil Dead Burn isn’t for the faint of heart. But if you’re a seasoned horror fan looking for one of the year’s most vicious theatrical experiences, this family gathering from Hell absolutely delivers.
'Evil Dead Burn' is now playing in theaters.
