The Evil Dead franchise is known for its wicked sense of humor, so what better way to kick off this latest entry than with a dig at dead teenager films?  Unlike its predecessors, Evil Dead Rise isn’t set in a secluded cabin in the woods, but at a cabin by a lake.  The sun is shining, the water is glistening and a couple of teenagers are annoying each other.  (Ah, hormones.)  The standoffish Teresa (Mirabai Pease) defiantly reads her paperback copy of Wuthering Heights while trying to ignore Caleb (Richard Crouchley), her cousin Jessica’s oafish boyfriend.  If you’ve seen more than one slasher movie, you know that these characters will soon be dead.  That’s true here, but this movie definitely wants to make a statement in that regard.

When Theresa goes to check on Jessica (Anna-Maree Thomas), something’s definitely not right.  Jessica awakens and begins reciting sentences from the page Teresa is currently reading with an angry voice.  Jessica then barfs and falls on the floor.  A concerned Teresa checks on an apparently dead Jessica, but wait, she’s not completely dead.  Well, she is dead, but she’s now one of the evil dead.  After ferociously wounding Teresa and killing Caleb, Jessica rises triumphant from the lake.  After a ten year absence, the evil dead are back!

Cut to the previous day, and an entirely different set of characters.  (Don’t worry, the plot is a neat little Mobius strip.)  Single mom Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) is a tattoo artist raising her brood of quirky yet handsome children in a rundown apartment in LA.  (The movie was actually filmed in New Zealand.)  There’s the cerebral Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), budding DJ Danny (Morgan Davies) and Kassie (Nell Fisher), the youngest of the bunch and cute as a button.  The kids are all well-adjusted and get along with each other, proof that Ellie is a good mom.  (Dad is no longer in the picture.)

It’s a dark and stormy night, so it fits when Ellie’s prodigal sister Beth (Lily Sullivan) arrives unannounced.  The two have some mildly bad blood between them.  Ellie’s upset that Beth never returned her calls when Ellie split with the kids’ father.  Beth is upset at how Ellie thinks of her as a groupie and not a guitar tech.  As far as sibling rivalry goes, this is small potatoes, nothing that the two can’t sort out over takeout pizza.  Then an earthquake happens, putting Ellie and Beth’s reconciliation on hold–permanently.

The tremors create a hole in the foundation to a long-forgotten bank vault.  Danny, who probably loves horror movies, drops down into the gloom to explore.  He returns with a hideous book bound in leather and a set of 78’s dated 1923.  Over Bridget’s objections, Danny manages to open what fans of this franchise instantly recognize as the Book of the Dead.  Danny is mesmerized by the awful pictures inside, all of which have been drawn with human blood.  When Ellie leaves to seek help, Danny plays the 78’s.   They’re the spoken record of Father Marcus Littleton, who insisted on translating the book’s evil incantations “for the good of man” over the loud objections of his colleagues.  

When Danny plays the second album, the Father speaks the incantation that calls the evil dead, who rush on over.  Ellie is ambushed in the elevator by evil spirits and returns home a changed woman, and not for the better.  After making the least appetizing scrambled eggs ever, Ellie throws up what looks like soapy water and begs Beth to not let them take her babies.  She dies, but has been possessed by the evil dead.  Ellie rises, tosses out some caustic insults and proceeds to attack Beth and her children.  They manage to lock her out of the apartment, much to the chagrin of the neighbors.  This part of the movie features two of the movie’s best shots.  The first is when Ellie kills one of the neighbors with another’s eyeball.  (I won’t spoil it for you but trust me, you must see it to believe it.)  The second is a spyhole view of  Ellie viciously offing the neighbors in brutal fashion.  (Note: the evil dead do not discriminate.  Everyone is perfectly suitable for slaughter.)

As with the other Evil Dead movies (and zombie movies, to be sure), the plot boils down to survival.  Will Beth be able to successfully prevent Ellie’s children from being killed by the animated corpse of their mother.  Since she’s in a fight to the death with the evil dead, there will be casualties.  Beth has always considered herself a screw up, so she naturally is hard on herself when several of the children become sadistic killing machines.  If you’ve seen any of the previous movies of this franchise, you know the fight is basically hopeless–unless you have a chainsaw handy.

As you’ve likely guessed by now, the final battle pits Beth against her evil dead family, and there’s a giddy amount of blood and righteous chainsaw action.  The movie also has the best homage to the bloody elevator in The Shining I’ve seen to date.  (Sorry, Us.  You get no points for trying.)  As I mentioned above, the movie ends where it started, revealing why that trip to the lake took such a fiendish turn.

Evil Dead Rise successfully captures the hellbound roller coaster vibe that has been this horror franchise’s signature since it began in 1981.  Even though writer-director uses only a few of franchise creator Sam Raimi’s stylistic trademarks, his film is faithful to the franchise’s mythos while being distinct in its own right.  This movie may not be as ferociously demented as Raimi’s films, but it bears all the hallmarks of an evil dead movie.  The secret weapon of these films has been watching nice people being transformed into cackling, murderous freaks.  Evil Dead Rises is a great horror movie because it succeeds where so many others fail.  It’s stylish, efficient, well-acted, scary without depending on gimmicks and–most importantly–is wickedly fun.  Of all of the demonic possession movies I’ve seen in 2023, this is the best by far.  Recommended.

Analysis

For a long time I’ve wondered why stories with zombies have failed to excite me.  I’ve seen The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, 28 Days Later, Night of the Living Dead and other movies and television shows with zombies in them, but they barely hold my interest.  The best I can figure is that I saw The Evil Dead (1981) when I was very young, and the movie spoiled the zombie experience for me.

I know that not all zombies are created equal.  There are fast ones and slow ones, for example.  For all I know, they’re able to think and talk now.  While I applaud the progress made towards zombie representation in entertainment, it doesn’t help that zombies are still basically the same as they’ve always been for eons.  They shuffle around, their bodies in some form of decay, and moan and growl at the living they are chasing.  And when they catch their prey, they eat them.  Huzzah.  They’re always one-note villains, no matter the story.  Their job is to hunt the living until someone puts a bullet into their brains.

Obviously, the function of zombies in entertainment is largely symbolic.  In most cases, they represent our fear of death, or at least a painful, violent death.  Like death, zombies stalk us and remain steadfast in their pursuit of us, their inevitable victims.  Fine, but why do zombies have to be so boring?  If they can move about, why can’t they talk?  Why must they be clueless idiots?  Why can’t they be…interesting?

Where it all began

Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead took the idea of zombies and turbocharged them.  He combined the elements of zombie movies with those of demonic possession movies and voila:  the evil dead.   The evil dead are much deadlier (and much more fun) than zombies for several key reasons.  First, the evil dead can’t be killed because they’re already dead.  Second, they’re much more mobile than the typical zombie.  (Yes, I know about the “fast zombies.”)  Third, they can talk.  Why settle for grumbling zombies when you can have a monster saying killer lines like these:

Ellie: It was a perfect day and all I could think about was how much I wanted to cut you all open and climb inside your bodies so that we could stay one happy family.

Ellie:  Mommy’s with the maggots now.

Ellie:  I’m free now.  Free from all you titty-sucking parasites.

Bridgett:  I gotta kill the creepy-crawlies I got inside my tummy.

Lastly, the evil dead know everything their victims knew.  So they can toss out painful recriminations like this:

Ellie: Open the door like you open your legs, you stinking groupie slut!

To sum up, the evil dead are nearly indestructible, incredibly nimble, irrepressibly verbal and know who you are.  Oh, and they enjoy killing.

My memory is a bit fuzzy on the previous movies, but in Evil Dead Rise, the dead really get a kick out of stalking the living.  Unlike the usual dumbstruck zombie, the possessed Ellie takes sadistic glee in tormenting Beth and her children.  The demon(s) inside Ellie love pretending to be their mother, using her voice, angling for sympathy, begging with crocodile tears to be let back into the apartment.  The evil dead don’t play fair, but they are demons after all.  There’s work to be done and dawn is fast approaching.  There’s no sense in pussyfooting when there’s living beings to possess.

Wish fulfillment?

On some level, the Evil Dead movies tap into our darkest fantasies.  Beth, Ellie and her children aren’t annoying like the teenagers at the beginning of the movie.  They’re good people trying to do the right thing, and life gives them shit sandwiches in return.  Beth and Ellie’s anger and frustration is easy to relate to, as is the desire to stop playing nice and begin exacting revenge.  The evil dead in this movie and the previous entries represent the suppressed homicidal urge inside all of us, just waiting for an excuse to come out and do some damage.  Thankfully, it’s only a movie.  Excuse me while I open this curiously bound tome I just found in a hidden chamber in my basement.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

I’m puzzled why there was a ten year gap between this movie and the last entry in the franchise, given that 2013’s The Evil Dead made a solid profit.  I haven’t seen the Ash vs The Evil Dead series on Starz (2015-18), so I can’t say whether it made sense for this series to become a show on premium cable or not.  Even if it were, it’s not like making an evil dead movie is as  complicated as it is with other horror franchises.  The best part about the evil dead movies has been how free they have been from lore.  Outside of recurring character Ash (Bruce Campbell), the essence of these movies is straightforward enough for anyone to digest.  Introduce some nice people, one of whom naively summons the evil dead. The dead rush in and promptly possess and kill the innocents in rapid fashion. One of the beleaguered survivors manages to channel their inner Ash and hold off the dead until the morning light. That’s it.  After the relatively simple setup, an evil dead movie pushes the action full throttle, pausing briefly for the occasional breather (or bad pun).

I mentioned above how Cronin makes an evil dead that is faithful to the franchise but not slavish to what has happened before.  He does several things that call back to previous movies, but they are more or less required to connect this story as being an evil dead movie.  There are several rambling Steadicam shots from the evil dead’s perspective.  Ellie is strung up by elevator cables before being possessed.  The evil dead shout “Dead by dawn!”  Beth becomes covered in blood and wields a chainsaw just like Ash.  Cronin’s movie feels like one of Raimi’s evil dead films, but goes about its business in a refreshingly new way.

The part of Evil Dead Rise I appreciated most is how it finally takes the evil dead out of the backwoods and into new terrain.  Even better, the evil dead can operate in broad daylight.  I’m extremely curious what will happen in the next movie, to see what “it” will do with Jessica.  Will she torment other people at the lake, or will she take her horror show on the road?  For the first time in a long time, I’m intrigued where a horror franchise will go next.

Casting

Casting the Evil Dead Rise must have been fun.  Unlike most horror movies, casting directors Kirsty McGregor and Stu Turner had to find two beautiful actresses who could do more than scream convincingly.  Lily Sullivan (Beth) had to transform from a caring mother into a rotting, strutting demonic corpse.  Alyssa Sutherland (Ellie) goes from being a self-doubting screwup to a blood-soaked, chainsaw-wielding protector.  Even more incredible (to me at least) was how Sullivan and Sutherland managed to be so…alluring with all of the blood and guts flying about.  The Sexy Evil Dead Rise indeed.