Evil Dead Burn Review - A Worthy Entry in One of Horror’s Nastiest Franchises
The Evil Dead series has survived 45 years and an improbable number of creative reinventions by understanding something that most horror franchises eventually forget: that nastiness alone is not enough. The original Sam Raimi film derived its power from the combination of genuine fear and a grotesque comic energy that bordered on slapstick – a sensibility that suggested Raimi had looked at the conventions of horror and decided to push them past the point of dignity into something almost hallucinatory. Fede Alvarez’s 2013 entry stripped most of that humor out and replaced it with an admirably unrelenting brutality. Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise in 2023 found the balance again – a film of finely calibrated joyride nastiness that used the setting of a high-rise apartment building and the premise of a possessed mother to say something genuinely disturbing about the fragility of family love.
Evil Dead Burn is the latest in a series of Evil Dead sequels designed to give promising early-career horror directors a shot at the franchise, and the choice of Sebastien Vanicek – a French filmmaker who broke out with 2023’s Infested, a horror film about deadly spiders overrunning a high-rise – turns out to be a logical one. Vanicek understands visceral containment. He knows how to build dread in enclosed spaces, and how to use cluttered environments and limited sightlines to create the particular horror of not knowing what is around a corner or behind a door. And he understands the Evil Dead series’ mandate, which is essentially that any inheritor of Raimi’s crown must strive to unleash a torrent of shamelessly nasty thrills in whatever creative combination presents itself.
The film begins at the same lake we left off at in Evil Dead Rise in a scene that ultimately culminates in a fiery car crash that kills Will, the son of an unhappy rural family, and deposits the Deadite menace directly into the orbit of his French widow Alice, his surly parents Susan and Edgar, and an ensemble of potential victims assembled at the family’s creaky colonial mansion for the funeral that becomes, with the swiftness characteristic of this franchise, something considerably worse than a bad family reunion.
The colonial mansion setting is one of the film’s better creative decisions. Where Evil Dead Rise used the vertical geography of an apartment building to generate a specific kind of trapped-animal horror, Vanicek uses the sprawl of a multi-floored house – its cluttered rooms, its dark corners, its multiple levels that the evil can colonize one by one – to create a haunted house logic that the film exploits with variable effectiveness. The best sequences are those confined to the smallest spaces: a confrontation inside a car, a bathroom scene whose violence is contained to a degree that makes it almost unbearably tense.
What makes Evil Dead Burn more interesting than merely a competent gore machine is the layer of subtext running through its domestic premise. The nuclear family presented here is already a site of barely suppressed misery before the Deadite arrives. Alice has always been an outsider in Will’s family – French, different, never fully welcomed – and the fuzzy flashbacks to their marriage reveal an ambivalence in her mourning that is more honest and more complicated than the film’s surface horror might suggest. The demonic possession, when it begins distributing itself among the family members, functions as a literalization of what was already present: the way families can turn on the people they have never quite accepted, the way grief can become a weapon, the way houses filled with unspoken resentment and false intimacy are already halfway to haunted.
Where the film most succeeds is in its weird and cruel sense of humor, which meshes with the franchise’s characteristic blasphemy in ways that consistently produce the genre’s most elusive effect: the laugh that arrives simultaneously with the gasp. A sequence featuring a grandmother’s stair lift, which weaponizes dementia and mobility assistance technology in ways that are simultaneously in terrible taste and also legitimately funny. These are the moments when Vanicek finds the register that Raimi identified 45 years ago and Cronin recaptured so brilliantly two years back: the register that refuses to choose between horror and comedy because the best horror has always understood they are the same impulse, pointed in different directions.
Souheila Yacoub’s Alice carries the film’s dramatic weight with commitment, and Hunter Doohan’s soft-spoken Joseph and Luciane Buchanan’s Thya provide the film’s most effective non-possessed characters – people we care about enough that their jeopardy generates genuine tension. Maude Davey’s Polly is the film’s most inspired piece of casting, a character whose physical limitations become both liability and, in the franchise’s darkly comedic tradition, unexpected resource.
Evil Dead Burn does not quite reach the heights of Evil Dead Rise, which remains the gold standard for what this latest set of Evil Dead films can accomplish since Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell largely handed off the reins to a new generation of filmmakers and actors. But the gaps between its best moments and its most conventional are smaller than they might have been, and its best moments are genuinely, impressively nasty.