There are few, if any, franchises whose identities are more closely knit to that of their creators than Evil Dead is to Sam Raimi, which makes its status as the horror genre’s proving ground for up-and-coming directors unique and unexpected. Fede Álvarez’s 2013 reboot was a torture-porn hangover with a predilection for power tools, while Lee Cronin, with 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, turned a high-rise into a playground for blood-splashed shock operatics. Now, Sébastien Vaniček’s takes the deadites for a spin with Evil Dead Burn, a relentlessly cruel rejiggering that makes every Evil Dead film before it seem like Sunday school.
After her husband William’s (George Pullar) death, Alice (Souheila Yacoub) joins with his family to cremate the body and celebrate his life. Though Alice is close with William’s brother, Joseph (Hunter Doohan), and his girlfriend, Thya (Luciane Buchanan), William’s mother, Susan (Tandi Wright), carries unresolved bitter feelings toward the widow. As the family sits down to dinner and the conversation turns into an argument over the particulars of the restaurant that William left behind, William’s father, Edgar (Erroll Shand), kills the family dog in a flurry of violence. It turns out that Susan’s father was researching that staple of the Evil Dead franchise, the Necronomicon, and the demons he once battled have shown up at the family’s doorstep.
Evil Dead Burn is a largely mirthless endeavor whose raison d’être is to show off Vaniček’s scare-making sensibility and inventiveness in bloodletting. While Raimi is famous for his splatstick, and Cronin’s flavor of mayhem tends toward the baroque, Vaniček’s approach is agonizingly personal, which was evident in his breakout film, 2023’s Infested.
Vaniček, cinematographer Philip Lozano, and editor Maxime Caro stitch together tightly choreographed sequences of violence as ugly as they are immediate, with an eye and appetite for ultraviolence that shows that they’re proudly carrying the torch of the New French Extremity movement. Vaniček favors a shuddery handheld camera to capture the brutality, but he also takes every opportunity to show off what he can do with gut-churning whip pans, top-down tracking shots, and showy long takes to accentuate the carnage.
Grotesque in ways that are sure to challenge viewer expectations, the up-close-and-personal nature of the cruelty gives it the stink of intimate partner violence, with the thematic echoes in Alice and William’s story becoming blaring sirens that consume Evil Dead Burn from the inside out. What begins as a nasty delight chronicling a noxious family quickly becomes a meditation on gendered abuse that, while well-intentioned, ends up feeling uncomfortably literal-minded.
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