Evil Dead Burn: the franchise returns with fire, fury and family dysfunction
A funeral at a secluded vacation house becomes a battleground of grief, resentment and demonic possession in Sébastien Vaniček's grisly new chapter of the Evil Dead series.
While the Evil Dead introduced that prime location for horror cinema, the cabin in the woods, Lee Cronin’s recent sequel/reboot Evil Dead Rise (2023) instead began and ended with a lake, and that is where Sébastien Vaniček’s sequel Evil Dead Burn also opens – indeed with the same demonically possessed character Jessica (here played by Greta van den Brink) emerging to murder two young men (Keanu Karim, Victory Ndukwe) who have gone fishing there. In an ironised throwback to the decade when Sam Raimi’s origjnal The Evil Dead (1981) came out, these two characters fall victim to that trope of horror where non-white characters are the ‘first to die’ (another will be the fourth). Here the protagonist Alice (Souheila Yacoub) represents a response to said trope – though immediately marked as an outsider to the (broadly white, American) family of Evil Dead films for being both mixed-race and French, she will, despite being underestimated and alienated by the caucasian clan into which she has married, in fact prove, as final girl, to be the last to live.
As though marking the transition to the film’s own element of fire, Jessica leaves the water causing Will Price (George Pullar), to crash into her while speeding in a drunken rage. Will is burnt alive in his car, triggering the rest of the plot. His family – mother Susan (Tandi Wright) and father Edgar (Erroll Shand), brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and sister-in-law Thya (Luciane Buchanan) and demented grandmother Polly (Maude Davey) – have gathered for his funeral. Also there is Will’s widow Alice, who knows her late husband’s controlling, abusive side too well to join the others in eulogising him. As the family assembles at their old, secluded vacation house to thrash things out, they will be possessed one after the other by Deadites come to find a Macguffin-y artefact which Will’s late grandfather has concealed somewhere on the property, and which alone can send the Deadites back to Hell.
Or maybe the Deadites are just an established vehicle for expressing – in a visceral genre movie vocabulary – all the bitter recriminations, deep dysfunction and repressed violence that can easily tear any family apart at times of heightened stress. Everything in Vaniček’s screenplay, co-written with Florent Bernard, comes ambiguated and overdetermined between the psychological and the diabolical. If its first death evokes the hooks used by demonic ‘Cenobite’ Pinhead in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987), its final scene (mid-credits coda aside) alludes directly to the ending of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not (2019), with its similar blend of the genetic and the satanic from a newcomer’s perspective.
Everything an Evil Dead fan could want and need – DP Philip Lozano’s restless, canted camerawork, a toolshed of domestic weapons, and shrill ordeals always bordering on the comic – are present and correct, making it a welcome new member of the family.
► Evil Dead Burn is in UK cinemas now