Sam Raimi has accomplished what so few horror film franchises have: He’s never made a bad Evil Dead film.
The latest release under the franchise, Evil Dead Rise, surpassed its blockbuster expectations and audience and critic reviews. This not only suggests that the supernatural horror franchise will churn out more gore-filled movies in its future, but as a long-term slasher film fan, it also gives me hope that the genre has not yet exhausted all of its tricks to the grave.
What The Evil Dead Franchise Is About
For those unfamiliar with the movies that launched Sam Raimi’s career as one of horror’s most famous auteurs, the Evil Dead franchise consists of mostly low-budget features and over-the-top supernatural horror. Meaning there are gallons and gallons of blood used and just about every trick to shock slasher film fans.
One of the best B-horror movies from the 80s, The Evil Dead (1981), created a formula for the sequels. A group of people, typically in their 20s, travels to a cabin in the woods for some rest and relaxation. After engaging in some merrymaking, the group discovers The Book of the Dead, or Necronomicon, and unknowingly summons demons of unparalleled malevolence.
While it was initially thought that the same book appeared in all the movies, Evil Dead Rise confirmed that there are several volumes of this forbidden text. The texts date from ancient Egypt and have been translated into Latin, which includes incantations that awaken demons into the world of the living. Maybe these young people never learned Latin, so they were unaware they were conjuring evil by uttering funny-sounding phrases from the book.
And that’s when a typical Evil Dead installment begins to sink its teeth into our jugular. A person from the group becomes possessed by sadistic spirits and spreads evil, usually by wounding others. The final girl (or boy, as The Evil Dead chose Bruce Campbell’s character Ash as its lone survivor) is able to evade possession only if they can execute the most killings of their former lover, friend, or family who is now merely a puppet of evil.
Evil Dead Rise: A Worthy Requel to the Franchise
Evil Dead Rise is the fifth movie in the horror film franchise. Sam Raimi only served as executive producer, while Irish filmmaker Lee Cronin wrote and executed a vision based on Raimi’s characters.
In this requel, a guitar technician named Beth visits her sister Ellie, a single mother to three children — Danny, Bridget, and Kassie. The family is in the process of moving out because their apartment building has been condemned. After an earthquake, the children discover an old bank vault in the building’s basement, and, against all common sense, Danny investigates and takes some artifacts back to their apartment. And yes, along with some recordings, one of those artifacts is a locked-away volume of The Book of the Dead.
Danny reads from the Necronomicon and blasts recordings of a priest who secretly summoned evil spirits that he trapped into the book. After the incantation has been recited, the power in their building suddenly dies, causing Ellie to get trapped in the elevator. She’s patient zero in Evil Dead Rise, and with Auntie Beth’s help, the children must defeat their own mother lest they will get possessed.
What Makes Evil Dead Rise Different From Previous Films
Evil Dead movies are so over-the-top that they could be considered camp. But the movies have always been well-acted, and Evil Dead Rise was no exception. Australian actress Lily Sutherland deserves special mention for killing it as the movie’s killer mom. Prosthetics aside, her physical performance was so grotesque and somehow alluring at the same time that it was hard to look away. Some of the scares might be familiar, but the all-out execution made them effective in creating a tense atmosphere all throughout the film.
Besides performances, it was Lee Cronin’s take on the franchise’s established formula that made Evil Dead Rise stand out. The cold open showed a group of young adults in an isolated cabin, one of whom gets possessed by demons and attacks her friends. While familiar with the franchise, I couldn’t help but think, “Great, another movie set in a cabin in the woods.” I was glad to be proven wrong by Cronin, who flipped the franchise on its head by bringing its characters to the city.
A residential building in Los Angeles is the last place you’d think of associating with an Evil Dead flick. The city is crowded, and so are the apartment buildings. However, Cronin was able to engineer a story that brought evil out of the woods and into the city without making it seem unlikely to happen. An earthquake and a thunderstorm created the isolation that characters in a slasher movie need to be doomed to die without outside help. The outside help that Ellie’s family did have was from the people who lived on their floor. And (spoiler alert) anyone who tried to offer a hand or a shotgun to blast the demon out of her suffered the most malignant death.
It’s refreshing to see a slasher film embrace the city. Aside from Evil Dead, horror franchises like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th have beaten that horse to death, and they became forgettable. Recent horror movies have tried to escape that by experimenting with more urban settings. For instance, the latest installment of Scream is set in the heart of New York City, with the characters running from their apartment to Central Park via crowded subways. Another movie that I’m looking forward to is the final movie in the X trilogy. Directed by Ti West and starring Mia Goth, both X and Pearl are set in isolated farmhouses, which are crucial in their story arcs. But Maxxxine is set in LA as the titular character tries to find fame in Hollywood. It wouldn’t make sense to have the protagonist stuck in another rural setting.
Like Scream and Maxxxine, The “unusual” location in Evil Dead Rise is crucial to the story that Cronin really wanted to tell. Evil Dead has never really been about the remote location but about how a close-knit group of people becomes victim to a demon — a sadistic demon who forces them to do the unthinkable task of mutilating each other.
Cronin says to Empire Online, “To me it felt very natural to make that move. It wasn’t forced in some way of like, ‘We need Evil Dead in the city!’ It was, ‘I want a family, and I want it to be urban’.” Indeed, the family dynamic added emotional depth that is usually lacking in a gorefest.
Perhaps the big difference that Evil Dead Rise made is crafting a story from a set of characters first and finding a setting that makes sense instead of making them fit in the same tired location. Sure, Friday the 13th once scared us out of going to summer camp, but we eventually became desensitized to the possible horrors of an isolated cabin in the woods. But after Evil Dead Rise, I’ve never been so terrified to ride an elevator or keep a cheese grater in my kitchen.
Watch the Evil Dead Rise trailer below: