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(Review) EVIL DEAD BURN Proves this Franchise Doesn't Need Ash to Make You Swallow your Soul

By. Professor Horror

 

The Evil Dead series has had a long, gnarly road to get here. What started as Sam Raimi's scrappy 1981 cabin-in-the-woods nightmare grew into a trilogy, a beloved television series, a 2013 remake, and eventually EVIL DEAD BURN, which took the bold swing of dropping Ash Williams entirely in favor of a high-rise apartment building and a mother possessed by her own maternal instincts. Rise was a rough jump for a lot of longtime fans (myself included) the kind of tonal handoff that left you wondering whether the franchise could survive without its chainsaw-armed, one-liner-spitting mascot. EVIL DEAD BURN, directed by Sébastien Vaniček and co-written with Florent Bernard, answers that question with a resounding yes. This is a film that proves the series can still make you feel dead by dawn even when Ash never shows up to the party, and it does so with a story about grief, generational rot, and a family that was already broken long before anything demonic came knocking.

The cold opening does the necessary mythology lifting fast and without hand-holding. We get the briefest of primers on the Necronomicon, the flesh-bound Book of the Dead, and the reminder that this particular strain of evil never truly dies because someone, somewhere, always ends up reading from it again. Once the Deadites rise, the film wastes no time establishing that escape is not really on the table. We are taken to a quiet, secluded lake house, the kind of place that photographs like a postcard until you remember early Evil Dead film has taught you that nature is never on your side. Vaniček leans hard on the franchise's signature camera language here too, that herky-jerky, ground-level rush toward the subject as though something invisible and furious is sprinting straight at you through the trees. He uses the technique liberally throughout the film, but wisely strips away the rumbling, guttural sound design that usually accompanies it in earlier entries, letting the visual do the talking on its own. It's a minor tweak, but it keeps the shot true to the original films' spirit without just replaying it note for note.

The actual engine of the story is a family gathering that curdles fast. Joseph (Hunter Doohan), a struggling writer, is celebrating his birthday with his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan), his older brother Will (George Pullar), and Will's wife Alice (Souheila Yacoub). The birthday gathering starts warm enough, the kind of forced cheer families perform when everyone privately suspects the night is going to go sideways, and it does not take long before tensions rise. Lover's quarrels needle their way into the toasts, voices climb, and Will, rather than sitting down and actually talking to his wife like an adult, storms out and speeds off into the night still fuming. He survives the argument just fine. What he finds waiting for him at the end of that drive is a different story entirely.

Horror has a habit of turning emotional baggage into literal monsters. Read our review of THE BACKROOMS, where trauma creates an endless labyrinth every bit as terrifying as the Deadites.

As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that this family's wounds run far deeper than one ruined birthday. Joseph and Will's grandfather spent years researching the Necronomicon alongside the franchise's own Professor Knowby, and that obsession meant neglecting the family he left behind to chase it. You would expect the demons to be the source of all this dysfunction, but BURN is careful to establish that nobody in this family particularly liked each other well before any Deadite showed up. Nobody trusts the people they married, the people who married in, or the people who raised them, and Will's own behavior toward Alice reads as its own kind of quiet, familiar violence, the sort everyone at the table has clearly learned to see and not see at the same time, passing the plates and refilling the wine as though nothing is happening right in front of them. That is really the sharpest thing BURN has to say: families have a long, practiced habit of turning a deaf ear to abusive men as long as staying angry and staying quiet is easier than actually confronting what is happening in their own dining room. The demons do not invent this family's secrets. They just drag them, shrieking, out into the light where nobody can look away anymore.

None of that means the film skimps on the carnage (and thank god) it does not. Once the Deadites arrive in force, the violence rarely lets up, stabbings and finger amputations and every manner of gleefully horrific practical effect stacking on top of each other with real relentlessness. The dramatic tracking shots and whip pans exacerbate the impact of the violence, and the long takes during the fight scenes are a work of violent, choreographed beauty. Just the amount of destruction that occurs in a single shot is staggering. One sequence involving nothing more than a fountain pen had me wincing so hard I could practically feel it entering my own body, right along with the character. Grandma Polly (Maude Davey) provides most of the film's comic relief, her memory mostly gone and her filter along with it, cutting through the tension just enough to let you exhale before the next gut punch. BURN does not lean into horror-comedy as hard as the original trilogy or the TV show did, but it brings noticeably more humor than Rise or the 2013 remake managed, and Polly's confused, cheerfully unbothered line deliveries are doing most of that work.

EVIL DEAD BURN is proof that this franchise still has plenty of blood left to spill without Ash Williams anywhere in sight. It is gory, it is smart about where that gore comes from, and it has real teeth when it comes to the domestic rot festering underneath its demonic mythology. Grandma Polly (Maude Davey) provides most of the film's comic relief, her memory mostly gone and her filter along with it, cutting through the tension just enough to let you exhale before the next gut punch. BURN does not lean into horror-comedy as hard as the original trilogy or the TV show did, but it brings noticeably more humor than Rise or the 2013 remake managed, and Polly's confused, cheerfully unbothered line deliveries are doing most of that work. This is the most confident Evil Dead has felt in years, and it earns every ounce of its brutality. Plus, I will never look at a pen the same way again.  

If EVIL DEAD BURN left you craving more inventive body horror, don't miss our review of SACCHARINE, where Natalie Erika James transforms hunger, bodily transformation, and self-loathing into one of the year's most unsettling nightmares.

EVIL DEAD BURN comes to theaters July 10th.