Horror is the deepest genre bucket. A good horror movie can be just about anything. It’s a ready-made, adaptable genre wherein filmmakers get to experiment. When it’s attached to a big franchise, those filmmakers are given free reign, to make the movie and story they want, with the upside of a preinstalled audience, and quick sign-offs on higher risk ideas.
Evil Dead has become one of our best genre playgrounds. In the deep bucket of horror, where movies can be just about anything, Evil Dead often has been. It’s been an upstart indie darling, a comedy about horror, a special effects showcase, a darkly brooding trauma fest, a moveable feast of wretched, blood-soaked evil, made presentable for a blood-thirsty audience.
The last Evil Dead film, Evil Dead Rise, moved the cabin in the woods premise to some apartments. With heightened verticality, Lee Cronin used the same famed Book of the Dead, incantations, and Deadites, to tell a modern story in a new way.
Sébastien Vaniček has inherited the franchise, having proven his horror chops in the very good French film Vermines (2023), which used insect infestation as a parallel to stigmatization of marginalized communities.
Now, Vaniček has crafted an Evil Dead film which examines domestic violence, as it affects and is born from, the family unit. The film plays out in an old, dilapidated family home, where the grandfather has long studied the classic series grimoire, the Necronomicon, and happens to be in possession of a Deadite-killing dagger. The family have gathered to grieve the passing of their son, but they’re going to be grieving generational violence, instead. Recently widowed Alice (Souheila Yacoub), is drawn into a history of violence, as she processes the abuse she suffered at the hands of her late husband Will (George Pullar).
The film picks up pieces of Evil Dead Rise, but tells a gritty standalone story, with some of the starkest violence and brutality yet seen in the franchise. Vaniček finds many a ways to vivisect and dismember bodies, as the family are subsumed by the curse of their spiritual deadening.
Much of that violence echoes Alice’s past, in flashbacks or in ways where the actions of family members resemble the rhythms of abuse she has suffered. Where Evil Dead, then, has often been funny in the past — almost a satire of this sort of horror — it’s now become this sort of horror, served straight-up, and it’s harder to laugh very much anymore.
That may be fine, because there is enough to invest in, in its hyper-violent domestic nightmare, so that when we do laugh and wonder whether we should, there’s some sort of dismemberment right after to distract us from that problem.
We can let Vaniček cook, because he is at home, understanding that the brutality is always in service of his message, and that this playground is the best opportunity to push the boundaries. So he does. And there’s some special horror content here, some great hyper-escalation of the themes and motifs that have defined this great franchise.
The film stays the course and focuses on its particular point of view. Alice needs to find the dagger and end the curse. Fair play. It’s all fun and games up until the end, which can go both ways. The end comes with an escalation of instruments — trading chainsaws for jackhammers — but also comes with the strict cost of a very CG final Deadite, in a series so renowned for its practical effects. What a bloody, grotesque shame.
Evil Dead remains one of horror’s best playgrounds. In the deep bucket of horror, Evil Dead offers an open invitation to play with its themes and motifs, and yet again, it’s been taken up by a vanguard filmmaker who is doing really good work in that space. The future potential feels unlimited, that the series may continue on every few years and offer further opportunities to daring filmmakers, taking the risk out of their genre experiments, and for that we are exceptionally blessed.