What is an Evil Dead film? The franchise has been going strong since Sam Raimi’s 1981 classic; The Evil Dead was a deceivingly simple, but nevertheless brutal horror film that lingered in the mind of horror fans.
The two sequels, Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, leaned more towards humour but director Fede Álvarez made Evil Dead scary again with his well-received 2013 reboot. There was also Ash vs. Evil Dead, an horror comedy TV adaptation that ran for three seasons and is supposedly coming back in animated form.
It seems that the Evil Dead franchise can bend but never breaks, instead adapting to whatever genre or time period it needs to. But still, what really makes an Evil Dead film?
Credit: Studio Canal
I pose this question to writer-director Lee Cronin at a London hotel on a Thursday afternoon.
“To me, it’s something about the energy and the relentlessness of the horror,” he replies. His new film, Evil Dead Rise, is perhaps the most relentless horror film we’ve seen in a while, but unmistakable in its Evil Dead-ness.
Cronin is on the last leg of a long press tour for Evil Dead Rise. He mentions a recent junket where he completed a total of 60 interviews, all of them only four minutes in length. You would assume Cronin is tired of answering the vaguely similar questions about his film, but in person, he is focused and clearly a huge fan of Raimi’s original film.
“I didn’t want to ape Evil Dead movies in any way, but I did want it to feel spiritually and tonally connected.”
Credit: StudioCanal
Evil Dead Rise, which follows two estranged sisters as they’re attacked by an unknown, ancient evil force that turns one of them into a possessed maniac, has all the makings of a great Evil Dead movie.
Although Cronin’s film is largely set in an apartment complex, he also got to create his own cabin-in-the-woods moment in the film’s opening sequence, which he says he simply wanted to do as a fan of the franchise. Cronin also incorporates other major, signature Evil Dead elements into his film, like the iconic point-of-view shot and of course, the deadites themselves.
“They were always important and I think Sam Raimi and Bruce (Campbell) recognised my reverence for the franchise and that I would handle all those things in my own way, but I had to make them work for my story.”
Cronin pitched Evil Dead Rise to Raimi, Campbell and producer Robert Tapert, but for a long time, the general audiences thought the film was going to be called Evil Dead Now. “Actually, that was Bruce doing what Bruce does which is talk fast and loose,” Cronin laughs and explains Evil Dead Rise was always his title, but a simple misunderstanding led journalists around the world to report the name wrong after Bruce Campbell told Empire Magazine Evil Dead Now was in the works.
Book of the Dead or the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis also makes a triumphant, terrifying return in the film, but it has had quite a makeover in Evil Dead Rise. Although this is not a direct continuation of any individual Evil Dead film, Cronin’s film clearly takes place in the same, shared universe. Cronin notes that Army of Darkness had three different Necronomicons and since Raimi and Álvarez had done two books, he got to play around with the third version.
“There’s a little bit of life in this book that we haven’t seen before, like the teeth, and the fact that it absorbs blood, there’s a network of veins. I wanted it to have a bit more personality, as if it’s got this low level, evil pulse inside it.”
Cronin digs the book they used for filming out from his suitcase to show me. It looks just as intimidating and menacing in person as it does in the film. The director tells me everything in the book was handmade over several months and every creepy page was hand-aged to look the part. “We didn’t leave any detail unturned in this movie, we made everything as practical and as authentic as we could.”
Cronin also stresses that even though he was making a franchise film and working with Sam Raimi, nothing was ever dictated to him. He says he was tempted to include Sam Raimi’s Delta Oldsmobile, a car which pops up in most of Raimi’s films, but ultimately decided against it.
Credit: Studio Canal
Cronin got the gig after directing 2019’s horror hit The Hole In The Ground. While that film is completely different in tone and style, it shares a lot of thematic DNA with Evil Dead Rise, especially when it comes to exploring parental anxieties. Although Cronin is not a parent himself and quickly says he loves kids, these themes have a personal connection.
“It’s actually my fear of what it’s like to be a parent, when people start to lose their identity because they get absorbed by their children, which weirdly is kind of what happens in the movie!”
Cronin says he sees a little bit of Beth in himself and considers himself lucky he can sit in a nice London hotel all day talking to journalists rather than stress about such common worries as keeping a child alive. But the fascination with family-centric films isn’t just related to his contemporary fears and stems from his childhood.
“I was always drawn to films and the things that influenced me quite often had families in danger and families in peril. And I always think it’s a great way of communicating horror quickly with an audience as well.”
Credit: Studio Canal
The director has recently been wondering if he’s even capable of making a film that isn’t about family (“I’m not sure I can.”), but we must say, the themes feel right at home in the world of deadites and deadly books.
Cronin first got to properly writing the script just as COVID had brought the world into a standstill. I’m wary of bringing the pandemic into the conversation but I ask if we’re perhaps more scared of each other now too?
“I was literally sitting on my bed, writing this screenplay with an unknown force outside my front door. It did have that little bit of influence to it and probably allowed me to double down on the claustrophobia in the movie.
“I bring the horror to the home, whereas other Evil Dead movies, [the characters] go to the scary place. This is quite different in the sense that we’re in a familiar place, and the horror invades their safe space.”
Credit: Studio Canal
Evil Dead Rise is also littered with Evil Dead Easter eggs for hawkeyed viewers as well as a couple of nifty references to other iconic horror films. I ask if these were deliberate. “They weren’t necessarily in my mind. They’re just inside me as references so they come out through my ideas.”
Cronin says he’s okay with “overt references”.
“There’s a screenplay I’m writing at the moment that I’ve put a very intentional The Shining reference in, which is very different from the one in Evil Dead Rise.”
We’ll probably have to wait a while to hear more about that film, but if Evil Dead Rise is going to be as big of a hit as we’re predicting, Cronin will be a busy man in Hollywood for a long time.
Evil Dead Rise is in cinemas 21 April.
