There’s been so much talk of legacy sequels over the last few years—personally, I tend to balk at them on general principle. The only ones I felt really fully justified their existences were Matrix: Resurrections (which I love more with each passing day) and Bill & Ted: Face the Music (which made me cry at a Bill & Ted movie ffs). Does Evil Dead Rise fit the brief for a legacy sequel? It’s a new take on the franchise, introduces new characters, but it also does deploy some well-timed catchphrases and a certain Book of the Dead in ways that are designed to appeal to fans of the older films. Like I said, these things tend to make me nervous. I love what I love, for my own reasons, and I don’t need corporations feeding me some pre-chewed, regurgitated, ghost oatmeal version of things that used to bring me real visceral joy. Nostalgia, in my view, is death.
But the trailers for Evil Dead Rise looked creepy and fun, and I decided to take a chance on it. And holy shit was it great!
First, some basics: The new addition to the Evil Dead-verse seems to be taking place in a universe where the Book of the Dead had a slightly different arc than the one implied in 2013’s Evil Dead—unless maybe this is a backup copy. The film was written and directed by Lee Cronin, with Rob Tapert producing and Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi on board as executive producers.
The plot is the plot of an Evil Dead movie. Five main characters are sharing a small-ish space, and there’s some tension; innocent doofus accidentally invites evil spirits into the space; one-by-one the mortals are picked off and transformed into demons. In the first film it was Ash Williams, his girlfriend, his sister, his friend, and his friend’s girlfriend who headed to the woods for a fun weekend in a friend-of-a-friend’s cabin. In the remake/sequel it was Ash, a pair of archaeologists researching Sumerian deities, and a local couple back at the same cabin. The third broke the formula as it sent Ash back into the past to lead a medieval army… with mixed results. And the 2013 remake/reboot/sequel/whatever gives the formula a gritty update by making the group one young woman, Mia, who goes to her family’s long-abandoned vacation cabin to detox from heroin addiction, with help from her estranged big brother, his girlfriend, and her two closest friends. (It seems to be the same cabin, though, as Ash’s classic 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale is rusting away in the front yard.) The 2013 take on the story emphasized the idea that the demons needed five souls, no more no less, to begin their reign of terror. In Evil Dead Rise, that formula gets another update. Now the five main characters are somewhat estranged sisters Ellie and Beth, and Ellie’s three kids, which shifts the dynamics significantly.
For the non-spoiler crowd, I’ll say that the movie does some really fun work with blood and other bodily fluids. A lot of the classic catchphrases pop up, sometimes to be subverted, sometimes to be used as straight homage. The acting is fantastic—when the mortals are still human, we feel for them, but once they’re possessed, they’re delightfully unhinged. All three kids are realistically “kids who have found themselves in a horror movie.” And, crucial to the Evil Dead ethos, there is a lot of sick gross-out humor and gore. But what works is that this film captures the spirit of the older films. Yeah, it could have been even grosser, but when the filmmakers go all out, it’s fun as hell, and my nearly full mid-day Saturday screening filled the air with hoots and hollers.
To get into a bit more detail will also mean spoiling some stuff, so if you want to go in cold you should hop out here!
Back when I was a kid, I had an uncomplicated view of the future, rooted in a shallow understanding of Hegel. I thought progress was real, and inevitable. Better laws and more inclusive pop culture would cause racism and homophobia to ebb like a tide; misogyny would die out as men saw women working in every area of life. I was usually a smart kid, but not always.
But part of this belief has come to pass. I thought that we would see more and more adults who chose not to give up their youth. We would have multiple generations of pierced, tattooed, videogame-playing parents who had grown up in pits and protests and comics shops and refused to put away childish things—or even to consider the things they enjoyed childish. This part I was right about, and that’s led to manbabies and Large Adult Children and 4Chan, but it’s also led to characters like Beth and Ellie in Evil Dead Rise. Beth is a guitar tech, and while she’s pretty scattered and irresponsible, she also proves herself to be a kick-ass aunt when shit gets real. Her sister Ellie is a tattoo artist, and we meet her soldering one of her guns before she retires to the bathroom to dye her hair red. We quickly see that she’s created a home where her eldest son Danny can work on music mixes at high volume, her elder daughter Bridget is busy making signs for a climate collapse protest, and her younger daughter Kassie is creating “Staffanie”—a pointed stick topped with a creepy doll’s head that can act as both weapon and talisman.
This is a Glass Family update I can support.
Ellie’s husband has abruptly picked up and moved in with a younger woman, but the four of them are dealing with that as well as hey can, and they’re clearly a real family—they respect each other’s weirdnesses and quirks and creativity. In a different kind of story, they would represent the future I hoped for so fervently back in high school. As it is… they’re a double-edged staff-with-a-doll’s-head. I loved this family immediately, which meant that I rooted for them, which meant that the joy of Evil Dead was a little undercut. Part of the fun with the original films is that Ash is a cartoon character. Even during the first, more serious film, the violence is so over-the-top that it’s fun. In the 2013 sequel/remake/reboot/whatever, the filmmakers went for a tonal shift by giving the characters’ real-world baggage to bring to the cabin, and then subjecting them to an hour and a half of truly brutal violence. I know many people loved the shift in direction, but for me, while I appreciated the film, it only really kicked into what I’d consider “Evil Dead gear” in the batshit closing scenes. Evil Dead Rise threads between these two axes. (Or chainsaws. Whatever.) It creates a real world full of warmth and human connection, then tears all those connections apart with unhinged violence and grotesque effects.
I wrote about this a bit in my review of the newest Hellraiser film—do I want to feel this much empathy for characters when I’m going to watch them saw their appendages off and get projectile bile puked all over them? But at the same time, the worldbuilding and stakes-lifting only adds to the tension as things go to shit.
Buy the Book
A House With Good Bones
And this might sound weird, but I also loved the realism. Ellie talks about how they’re going to have to move soon because the building’s being sold off. We meet Ellie’s neighbors, we see how dark and spooky the parking garage is, and how rickety the elevator feels. So then, as the supernatural things begin to close in, we watch as the family and their neighbors are cut off more and more from “the real world” in boiled-frog fashion, so no one even realizes that they’re trapped until it’s too late to do anything about it. I loved this as an innovation for the series—rather than sending them off to a cabin in the woods (or back to medieval-ish Europe) the film plays with the terror of knowing that there are people on the floors above and below you, and out on the street, but that the demonic forces will keep rescue just beyond your reach.
I also enjoyed the way the references and riffs were seeded through the movie. Both the obvious things like chainsaws, shotguns, and “Come get some” but also the sense of inevitability. The film’s opening gambit drops us into a trip to a cabin already in progress, then culminates with the words “One day earlier” flashing across the screen. We slowly learn where the Book of the Dead has been, and yet again, once it’s opened it seems to exert an unbreakable pull on one hapless victim, and its evil seems to survive every attempt at exorcism, burning, shredding, burying—it doesn’t matter what you throw at it, this fucking book will live on. Or, Deadite on, I guess. But the reason I enjoyed this one more than the 2013 Evil Dead was simply that it was willing to go to delirious heights of gross-ness. Why just zoom a camera at a naif in the woods fighting with a handsy tree (leafsy? rootsy?) when you can show elevator cords contorting a person into a variety of shapes in their elevator? Why only have a character projectile puke blood into someone’s mouth when you can ALSO fill that aforementioned elevator with blood? Why only have a hallway full of demons screaming Dead by dawn! when you can have several of the demons voltron themselves into a horrible shambling creature with three heads? Why just have a chainsaw when we live in a world that contain woodchippers among its multitudes?
But for me the strongest aspect with a recursive loop is the movie’s structure. We don’t open with Ellie and her kids, or even Beth and her latest fuck-up—we open with a totally unrelated group of three young people, a girl, her cousin, and her cousin’s boyfriend, at a ramshackle cabin in the woods by a lake. It soon becomes clear that a demon has tagged alone, havoc ensues, and the words “One day early” plaster themselves across the screen to throw us into the saga of Ellie and Beth. Because the cousin I mentioned? IS Ellie’s downstairs neighbor, who has no idea about any of the horrors that went on in her building. She comes down to the parking lot in the totally blood-free, functional elevator, calls her cousin to say she’s on the way, and is most of the way to her car before she notices the gouts of blood and viscera everywhere.
And the reason I love this is just, first of all, it’s a perfect reinforcement of the true horror of the supernatural. The Deadites warped reality so completely that this girl spent the night a few yards away from the carnage and never knew about any of it, because the impossibly powerful supernatural entity did not want her to know. And right along with that realization, as we watch the demon attach to her we realize that all of Ellie’s love for her children, and all of Beth’s sacrifices, haven’t even made a dent in the Deadites. The evil spirits will simply move on to the next victim and leave LA for the woods, and the Evil Dead series continues its reign of gleeful gross-out nihilism.
To be clear, though, Leah Schnelbach doesn’t think anything will ever top the deer head. Come join them in the blood-soaked Hellscape of Twitter!
