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The Evil Dead universe, created by Sam Raimi and remaining one of the most successful horror franchises in history, returns with a new chapter. Evil Dead Burn manages both to return to the sense of humor at the series’ roots and to push its limits further than ever before. Director Sébastien Vaniček and screenwriter Florent Bernard — deploying once again the unsettling, nerve-shredding style they showcased in Infested — remind us just how skilled they are at it.
This time, we have the most European Evil Dead film to date. The cold, nihilist, body-fragmentation-focused aesthetic of the New French Extremity movement is injected into the series through Evil Dead Burn. On one side, the chaotic and bloody dimension of the Deadite horror is blended with this movement; on the other, heavy themes such as domestic violence, toxic grief, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma are explored with a depth unseen in the series before — all within that same aesthetic framework. Buckle up for a journey that is excessive in its gore but equally traumatic in its emotional impact, rendered in an expressionist mode that channels the human “desire for destruction.”
Family, Trauma, and the Deadite Invasion
At the heart of Evil Dead Burn lies the collapse of a fractured family. The family members who gather after William’s death are characters who have already emotionally “buried” one another long ago. The Deadite invasion, at this point, transforms that emotional burial into a physical slaughter. The house where the family has gathered functions as a sealed laboratory built for the externalization of suppressed conflicts. Edgar and Susan’s hostility toward Alice is treated as a reflection of their own failures and their refusal to accept who William truly was. The Deadites thus become instruments representing the rot within the family, the hidden sadism, and the suppressed rage.
At this juncture, the ancient power unleashed by the Necronomicon serves as a catalyst for the family’s already-festering dysfunctional dynamics. Because the family cannot confront its own past, they are dragged toward inevitable bodily disintegration. Alice’s othering at the hands of her father-in-law and mother-in-law, and the willful blindness toward William’s abusive past, are critically important within the narrative — because this is precisely the point at which the meaning assigned to the Deadites shifts in a different direction, and the “perfect family” mask the household has been straining to keep in place is ripped from their faces.
What’s more, the presence of Polly — the grandmother suffering from dementia — is itself enough to understand everything about this family. While the deterioration of Polly’s mental faculties makes it hard to form a complete picture of her, her behavior and certain sentences at particular moments seem to bring the true character from her past into the light. Thus the family’s internally “constructed reality” gives way, with the invasion, to something raw, bloody, and nakedly truthful. Before the Deadites even entered the house, this family was already dead — the demons are there to show, legitimize, and prove just how bloody that death could be.
Inspired by classics of French horror, the film is remarkably effective at conveying the difficulty of both physical and psychological disintegration in an irritating, visceral form. It is impossible not to feel the intensity, bleak aesthetic, and depressive register of the New French Extremity — particularly films like High Tension (Haute Tension), Martyrs, The Horde (La Horde), Calvaire, In My Skin (Dans ma peau), Frontier(s) (Frontière(s)), Inside (À l’intérieur), and Them (Ils) — woven through the fabric of Evil Dead Burn.
Character Dynamics Through a Psychological Thriller Lens
The screenplay by Vaniček and Bernard refuses to take shelter in horror genre clichés, instead laying bare the “micro-aggressions” harbored within a family and the emotions that have been suppressed until they have nowhere left to go. No character in the film is merely space-filling; each is living through their own grief process, each fighting a distinct sense of guilt. The screenplay also succeeds in cleverly deploying clues within the tragedy before scattering the true seeds of sin within the family.
Another significant achievement of the screenplay is its ability to forge an unbreakable bond between “place” and “character.” The house itself, the family’s accumulated history, the decay, and the past research into the Kandarian Dagger all appear before us like co-habiting organisms. Everything here is trapped in the corridors of a rotting, crumbling house. And Alice must survive this physical and psychological war.
The use of Evil Dead mythology in the film is also excellent. Because the mythology serves not as exciting fan service, but as a catalyst that nourishes the center and the starting point of the family’s internal conflicts. Joseph’s obsessive fascination with his grandfather’s mysterious research, and the family’s disappointment in him, are of course no coincidence. Thus, as violence is pried open through past sins, the screenplay allows each character to experience this catastrophe through the lens of their own trauma. Each character comes to live out their own personal hell. Evil Dead Burn — putting the autopsy table to the question of how a family’s emotional and ethical bonds come apart — stands as one of the finest entries in the genre and the franchise.
The Visual Language Is Almost Everything
Under Vaniček‘s direction, the camera work is claustrophobic and fluid in a way that recalls action cinema — a marked departure from the previous films in the series. As the camera leaps from walls to ceilings and into Alice’s terror-filled eyes, it occasionally takes on a “shaky” quality during the confrontation scenes inside the house, doubling the tension of those moments. Under the cinematography of Philip Lozano, the grey, pallid, near-hopeless color palette inside the house creates such a striking contrast with blood red that the result is almost painterly.
As family members are possessed one by one, we feel as though the camera itself is losing control. You begin to feel as if you are seeing and experiencing things from a Deadite’s point of view. Every corner of the house becomes a full execution point. The tension that begins at the dining table, climbs to a peak, and never drops thereafter transforms every object in the house into a potential weapon. This is, after all, precisely what Evil Dead is — everything around you is a tool to be used against the demons.
The film’s aesthetic choices, too, seem designed to underscore the “chaotic nature” of violence. Vaniček never lets up from the first moment of violence to the last — on the contrary, you feel the dosage increasing with every passing moment. At this point, the visual language takes on the role of “storyteller.” Because every time the camera engages during moments of violence, we witness characters conveying the “heavy” words they cannot say to one another through bladed and piercing instruments.
The Fine Line Between Comedy and Horror
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Evil Dead Burn is its embrace and modernization of the sense of humor the series had adopted particularly since its second film. In the absence of Bruce Campbell, many assumed the franchise’s comedy had vanished entirely — but Evil Dead Burn steps in to address exactly that. Vaniček chooses to deploy humor exclusively in “situational” and “absurdist” moments. The grandmother’s dialogues — both before and after her possession — will certainly satisfy fans who love the series’ comedic side.
The collision moments that unfold around the stairway elevator, for instance, are the best proof of how audacious and absurdist the film can be. In scenes where Vaniček saturates the audience with violence and blood, he simultaneously refuses to compromise on the comedic dimension — giving everyone room to breathe in between. This humor is presented with an almost “instinctive” sensibility and never has a negative effect on the film’s overall tone. In fact, these laugh-inducing dialogues and situations can only be described as “complementary.”
Evil Dead (2013) and Evil Dead Rise were films that proceeded in a more serious register — and precisely because of that tone, they were never fully embraced by fans of the original trilogy. Yet it was from those films that the series’ modern-day impact arose, because both built their own distinct audiences. What those audiences share is an admiration for the Evil Dead universe, which is now growing once again. Evil Dead Burn, at this crossroads, has the power to speak to every type of fan the series has ever had.
The Next Link in the Chain
With the fire rising from Evil Dead Burn‘s ashes, we have also drawn considerably closer to the franchise’s next step. Evil Dead Wrath, to be directed by Francis Galluppi — who made a notable debut with The Last Stop in Yuma County — will take us back nine years before the original film, to 1972: a time long before Ash Williams discovered the Naturom Demonto, when the mythology was entirely untouched, raw, and unexplored. In other words, Evil Dead Wrath will do something no film in the series has ever done — take us to the absolute ground zero of this legend.
The film’s visual identity will be part of that time travel. Galluppi is making a special effort to capture the precise texture of the 1970s, with his target being the warm, sun-scorched aesthetic of vintage Ektachrome 100 film stock. What does that mean? What is Ektachrome 100? Simply put, think of the tone found in films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and I Spit on Your Grave — dirty, warm, dangerous, and sinful. This represents an aesthetic the Evil Dead universe has never seen before: a more stylized, raw, and period-specific approach.
Statements from Rob Tapert — producer and long-time collaborator of Sam Raimi — indicate just how far Evil Dead Wrath will push its limits, much as Evil Dead Burn did. According to Tapert, Evil Dead Wrath will take the series’ escalating brutality to entirely new dimensions. In the case of Evil Dead Burn specifically, certain violent scenes were altered due to their intensity — and even with those changes, the theatrical cut still delivers moments of extreme violence. As for Evil Dead Wrath — how it will handle such limits, or what we might see if it doesn’t, is hard to say. But given the film’s proximity to the exploitation cinema of the 1970s and its apparent inclusion of sexual themes, it is certain to be the most distinct narrative in the Evil Dead franchise to date.
Galluppi‘s directorial style will certainly be very different from Vaniček‘s. Rather than the chaotic, adrenaline-fueled, almost action-cinema-adjacent style that defines Evil Dead Burn, it seems we can expect a slower-burning narrative this time around — one built gradually, with its foundations firmly laid for maximum shock impact. Evil Dead Wrath — which will surely offer the most distinct tone in the series since 2013, when every director has brought their own style and signature — is set to release on April 7, 2028. Reaching simultaneously backward and forward in time, it will answer questions long awaiting resolution in the ever-richer Evil Dead mythology — and then bring an entirely new perspective that generates fresh mysteries of its own.
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