Cinema is a graveyard of failed sequels, franchises, and reboots. Five films in, The Evil Dead (1981-) series has avoided this fate. Following in the footsteps of directors Sam Raimi, Fede Álvarez, and Lee Cronin, the franchise is now in the hands of French filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček to see whether he and his co-writer, Florent Bernard, can keep this remarkably consistent run alive with their 2026 rendition, Evil Dead Burn.
Raimi’s original exploitation horror The Evil Dead (1981) introduced the Naturom Demonto, also known as Necronomicon Ex Mortis, or, more plainly, the Book of the Dead. Bound in human flesh, its pages contain an incantation that summons a demonic entity that possesses and turns its victims into “deadites”.
In The Evil Dead, five university students accidentally summon the Kandarian Demon after discovering the Naturom Demonto and playing an archaeologist’s audio recordings reciting the forbidden words. This established the ritualistic plot running through the series, where characters in all but Army of Darkness (1992) and Evil Dead Burn resurrect the demonic entity by either reading from the book or playing a recording. Meanwhile, Evil Dead II (1987) introduced the fabled Kandarian dagger, a mystical weapon that can send the deadites back to hell, ripping their demonic souls from their hosts’ bodies, which is integral to Evil Dead Burn’s plot.
After her husband’s funeral, Alice (Souheila Yacoub) joins her parents-in-law Susan (Tandi Wright) and Edgar (Erroll Shand), her grandmother-in-law Polly (Maude Davey), who is suffering from dementia, and brother-in-law Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan) at the family’s vacation home. Outside the large, rundown house with mouldy and leaking ceilings sits the rotting gazebo where Alice and Will (George Pullar) were wed.
Inside, family photographs, including those of Alice and Will on their wedding day, are covered in a sheen of dust. These are ominous omens. Adding to the tension, Alice is convinced that neither Susan nor Edgar wants her there, but Joseph insists that she was Will’s wife and that she’s family.
The house has recently been given to Joseph, an aspiring writer with only three abandoned books to his name. Rummaging around the house, he finds a collection of writings and audio recordings by his late grandfather, Benjamin Price, an ancient history professor. These mention the Book of the Dead and the origins of the Kandarian dagger, which, it turns out, was sealed and hidden by Price. Joseph dismisses his grandfather’s warnings that, if unsealed, the evil will “smell its call in the earth”, “taste it on the air”, and be drawn to it.
Evil Dead Burn is anchored in the heavier themes Fede Álvarez brought to the series with his 2013 standalone remake of Raimi’s original. It also marked the shift from the male-centric hero Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) to a heroine. Together, Evil Dead, Evil Dead Rise (2023), and Evil Dead Burn form a trilogy of broken heroines.
There’s a transition from Mia’s (Jane Levy) existential struggle with heroin addiction in Evil Dead to Beth’s existential crisis about motherhood in Evil Dead Rise. Vaniček and Bernard stay in existential crisis mode with Alice, who is reluctant to start a family with her abusive husband. Alice is an amalgamation of the maternally insecure Beth (Lily Sullivan), who is confronted with an unwanted pregnancy, and her sister Ellie’s (Alyssa Sutherland) marital strife, whose husband walked out on her and their children.
These social themes are a significant departure from Raimi’s trilogy, which started out as pure horror, shifted to horror-comedy for Evil Dead II, and then to fantasy for Army of Darkness. The series, now in its fourth decade, can only sustain itself if it evolves, which necessitates leaning into horror as a metaphor for addiction, motherhood, and toxic relationships. Evil Dead Burns’ tagline reads: “All families have their demons.” Unlike Álvarez and Cronin, who sparingly used the themes of addiction and motherhood to ground their story, Vaniček and Bernard wade into the horror as a metaphor for Alice trying to escape her past.
A cliché in horror cinema is that the monster or killer is not dead and that the protagonist must deliver a final, decisive death blow. Nearly the entirety of Evil Dead Burn is that second wind, where Alice’s past isn’t finished with her yet. Like Beth’s trial by fire, wherein fate throws down a gauntlet and demands she prove she’s worthy of being a mother, Alice will have to prove she’s free of her past.
Yacoub delivers a nuanced performance, finding the sweet spot between strength and vulnerability. What makes Alice a compelling heroine is how Yacoub internalizes her character’s angst and, at times, uses her eyes, body language, and silence to play with her in a revealingly subtle way. Vaniček pulls these details out with precision, and together he and Yacoub position Alice as emotionally and physically haunted by her past.
Yacoub, however, is allowed to directly reveal her character’s angst rather than making it feel as though Alice is being exposed by the filmmaker. The scenes where she’s walking on proverbial eggshells in her effort to belong – even earn Susan’s approval, a woman who knew about the abuse and looked the other way – are particularly uncomfortable to watch.
An important visual cue is the wedding video. It shows an edgier ceremony with loud music. Alice and Will are deliriously happy, but when we first meet Alice at Will’s club, where they’re celebrating Joseph’s birthday, the marriage has soured. Will’s dominating behaviour is physically present, and there are the briefest glimpses into Alice’s creative spirit. She’s reluctant to embrace her role in managing the restaurant and club, including handling the accounting, because she yearns for a different identity, meaning, and purpose. Alice tells one of the employees bumming a cigarette, “I’m not your boss.” Thya, however, points out that she kind of is.
Already a wife, Alice knows that she needs to find herself before becoming a mother. If she doesn’t, then she risks becoming further adrift. Our awareness that something has gone wrong for this beautiful human being, who is trying to preserve something of herself, forges an emotional bond with viewers, adding to the film’s tragic energy.
Thematically, Evil Dead Burn is about how one person can love another too much. Will’s love for Alice turns obsessively toxic, but she too is guilty of loving him too much. Maybe she was unable to leave him, even when he physically hurt her, because she hoped the Will she fell in love with was still inside him, somewhere. At the same time, Susan’s unconditional love for her son is her moral undoing, and when Joseph sees the scar on Alice’s abdomen, from a supposed kitchen accident, his expression is hardly one of shock. Is he too blinded by love for his brother?
Evil Dead Burn is unapologetically a gruelling ordeal for both the characters and the audience. Vaniček never neglects the humanity or contradictions of its characters at the heart of the story, whose tragedy is viscerally felt. For Susan, it’s a punishment for ignoring her son’s true nature and abandoning Alice, whom she failed to love and protect as if she were her own daughter.
Meanwhile, Joseph, a genuinely nice guy, is the inquisitive fool who tragically seals his own fate in pursuit of creative aspirations. Thya’s death and transformation, however, is where the blow of tragedy lands the hardest. It’s not only the brutality, but because she represents an innocence lost.
Buchanan shines as both the sweet, kind girlfriend and the depraved deadite. She rattles off the memorable one-liners, reveling in her maniacal liberation. Her stroke of brilliance is seen in how she laces her deadite with a hint of human remnant. This adds to her character’s delightfully wicked and playful sensibility, to the point that we quietly mourn the deadite’s demise.
Vaniček, along with his cinematographer Philip Lozano and editor Maxime Caro, brings visual artistry to Evil Dead Burn. The director is not the type to disappear behind the film, but then neither was Raimi. The signature “shaky cam”, which brought these demonic entities to life back in 1981’s Evil Dead, achieved by securing the camera to a plank of wood, was innovative low-budget filmmaking. The series has always encouraged filmmakers to be bold and creative. Vaniček and his team are happy to accept the invitation.
In the first scene, Joseph listens to his grandfather’s audio recordings and scours through his research. There’s that sinking feeling as we must rummage through a hidden and frightening history. This is complemented by the cinematography. The pen rolls off the desk and onto the floor, guiding Joseph to discover the Kandarian dagger.
Next, we’re looking into an eye, whose depths reveal a strange abstract-like image. Only it’s an inverted trick because we’re actually looking up to the surface of a lake. The camera zooms in on a lobster fishing cage which is hauled out of the water, pulling us upward and into the light of day.
There’s a wonderful geometry to these opening images that shows not only an assured hand but a desire to lift the film off the screen. Vaniček knows he’ll only have the one chance to make a strong first impression, and Cronin set the bar high with the scalping, self-mutilation, and decapitation in Evil Dead Rise’s (2023) prologue. Not holding back, Vaniček finds a way to evolve the wicked playfulness of the deadite, the same one in both films (Jessica, played by Anna-Maree Thomas). It’s a delightfully funny, suspenseful, and horrific opening, whose score elevates the theatrics.
Evil Dead Burn is as much a musical tour de force as it is a visual one. Scored by the self-taught musical duo Double Danger (Xavier Caux and Douglas Cavanna), the film’s musical texture ranges from nervous, pulse-pounding tension to choral and vocal elements. In some of its bombastic moments, it emphasizes a transcendental, spiritual-like clash between good and evil. By ingraining the human voice in the score, Double Danger help Vaniček to reach down and wrench up the raw emotions behind the tragedy and horror, black humor, and Alice’s will to survive.
As arresting as Vaniček is with framing, composition, movement, and music, he exercises a controlled pragmatism, picking his spots to go all in. Towards the end of the prologue, the Jessica deadite, walking through a forest and grazing tree branches and leaves with her fingertips, is surprisingly gentle and sensual. She evokes a reptile slithering through the growth. While this may seem like a minor point, it reveals Vaniček’s nuanced sensibility and explains why he can craft such a visceral emotional experience for his audience.
If we were wondering if this, the sixth installment, could keep the remarkable, consistent run alive, the answer is a resounding and triumphant yes. Evil Dead Burn marches the series on with renewed vigour and hints there are larger ambitions in motion for its future.