With a beautiful double-bluff opening – and not the film’s last double-bluff, either – Evil Dead Rise (2023) takes us straight to the ubiquitous cabin in the woods for its opening scenes. Reluctant cabin-goer Theresa (Mirabai Pease) is trying to dig in to her copy of Wuthering Heights, but her friend’s boyfriend Caleb is all too ready to interrupt her closest approximation to fun. So she heads indoors to see how their sickly mutual Jessica is doing and, it turns out, she’s doing none too well. None too well at all. Cabin, woods, new tendency in a friend to go from horizontal to vertical in a second: here we are, then, here’s where Evil Dead Rise is going to play out. Right? Nope. This sequence is simply here to jar us out of our expectations, on the micro and the macro level: with no time to waste it seems, this part of the film only serves to deliver the film’s modus operandi: nasty, ugly gore. Then we’re away, faster than a Deadite hearing an invocation (a term which, by the way, we never once hear in the film, but forgive me the shorthand here.)
Downtown LA: single parent family Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) and her three children, teenagers Bridget and Danny, and little Kassie, are doing their best to live normally ahead of an upcoming eviction from their now-condemned apartment block. They’re unexpectedly joined by Ellie’s younger sister Beth (Lily Sullivan), who lives on the road as a music tech, but has headed home under a rather predictable cloud – more on that anon. As Beth tries and largely fails to console her sister, fresh out of a break-up and with no discernible new home to offer her kids, an earthquake hits LA: newer, better-constructed buildings seem to get through this experience fairly unscathed, but the family’s Art Deco-era tower block suffers a big hit, not only losing power, but soon finding itself atop a large sinkhole which Danny, being an idiot, decides to explore.
He discovers an old vault, back from when their building used to be a bank, and emerges from the hole with a bundle of hundred-year old papers, a bunch of vinyl and – a mysteriously-bound book. By the way, it’s debatable whether anything much else would have happened here, had Danny not also been one of those new-wave vinyl guys; the world was fairly safe from the Deadites for a period of around thirty years, during the time analogue had seemingly gone into terminal decline. And now the record players are back, and essentially, the hipsters and the ‘you have to hear this on vinyl’ people have killed us all. You don’t need me to explain what happens to the mysterious vinyl recordings: they get played. Of course they get played. The book, too, starts to do its thing.
This film gives us a really unpleasant, grisly rendition of the Deadites which has far more in common with the remake-ish from a decade ago than it does with the 80s and 90s Evil Dead movies, let alone the Ash vs. Evil Dead TV series. The Deadites in this newest film – few in number, in keeping with the usual – aren’t as good-humoured as their forebears, perhaps. They smile, sure, but there’s not much laughter; everyone’s more serious about their work since the global economic downturn. This is an unrelentingly revolting vision throughout, and a key difference this time around is that the family dynamic is much more strongly centred, with a mother and her children the key target. The film troubles itself surprisingly little with modern social issues – although it threatens in that direction a couple of times – but if any one thing comes in for a serious drubbing here, it’s motherhood. Even pre-ordeal it’s represented as drudgery with a gloss of selflessness, and thereafter a source of sardonic glee for entities who mock it as a kind of parasitism. That being said, the main entity is quite Christian fundamentalist in its beliefs about who/what gets a soul and when: funny thing, there’s always unusual overlap between belief systems.
Evil Dead Rise is a grotesquely, inventively unpleasant piece of cinema which works the modern, urban setting very well, borrowing liberally from non-supernatural genres of home invasion and ordeal horror as well as riffing on the Evil Dead source material (which was always, let’s face it, a fairly simple plot which needed no embellishments). There are lots of nods to existing horror throughout, too, such as Hellraiser (particularly the new remake, actually), The Shining and even sci-fi body horror: Aliens came to mind a couple of times in certain scenes. The film also does what all films feel the need to do when they appear as a sequel or remake of some kind, and that’s to include Easter eggs which link to previous films. That’s not particularly compelling in Evil Dead Rise, as the tonal ugliness of the new film works against inclusions of scenes, symbols and lines which belong to the dark comedy content of the earlier films (and really, the whole opening scene can be seen as an Easter egg, which is a fairly large chunk of the film as a whole). But the film does work well on its own terms nonetheless, and there are definitely some openings for another one, should this film do well (it’s outstripping expectations so far). There’s one spoken line heard in the film which has set certain fans aflame with ideas about the next instalment, though it would be best to play cautious with that for now.
Would another film in this vein be a bad thing, though? Certainly not: absent the few minor issues, this is a brilliantly mean-spirited modern horror which walks a solid line between new ground and old. It’s strange, really, how watching the Deadites do what they do has become a source of enjoyment over the decades, but so it is: this film is a welcome addition to the Evil Dead universe and if it has established a tone for things to get even more visceral in future, then that can only be a positive.
Evil Dead Rise (2023) is in cinemas now.