We walked out of Evil Dead Burn, and the first thing Arthur said was, “Do you smell something burning right now? Does it smell like human flesh?” That is the correct reaction. When Warner Bros. announced the title, Meaghan called it immediately:
There better be fucking fire, because Evil Dead Rise was so perfect because it was in that huge high rise.
There is fire. There is so much fire. The house does not survive this movie, and neither do you.
Here is the thing about hype. Usually, a horror movie gets the “you are not ready” treatment on social media for six weeks, you finally sit down in the theatre, and you walk out going, okay, sure, that was fine. Evil Dead Burn is the exception.
Every person who told you they were not ready was telling the truth. Arthur put it best:
If you’re not good with pretty intense gory scenes, don’t buy the popcorn.
Spoilers ahead. Not all of them (we leave the really good stuff alone), but enough to see it first.
Evil Dead Burn Does Not Let You Breathe
The movie ramps up in under five minutes, and it never comes back down. Director Sébastien Vaniček said his intention was to create a “visceral sensory experience that punches audiences in the gut, and that he wanted people to feel physically drained walking out of the theatre.” Mission accomplished. We were both sitting in our seats, going, okay, this is happening now…
Arthur landed on an 8 out of 10, easily. Meaghan is somewhere between a 7.5 and an 8, and honestly, the gap is just a rounding error at this point. There is no downtime. There are maybe two or three seconds of relief scattered through the runtime, and every one of them is a joke, and (rare for this franchise lately) the jokes actually land.
The gore is genuinely a lot. There is one head-bashing sequence in this film where you see everything, and it turns out that it is not even the worst of what was shot. Vaniček has said the original cut landed an NC-17, and the trimming was done specifically around one scene he described as really, really hard.
His words. He kept the R rating so the movie could reach a wider audience, and a director’s cut could be substantially more violent. We are not sure our nerves can handle that, but we will absolutely watch it.
Trigger warnings before we go further, because these matter. The dog dies. It is bad, and if you needed to know that going in, now you do. There is also a significant domestic violence plot point that runs through the entire film. It is not incidental. It is the engine.
A French Filmmaker Walks Into a Cabin
Sébastien Vaniček is a French director, and this is only his second feature. His first was Infested (Vermines) in 2023, a bug movie that is exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds, and it is what caught Sam Raimi’s attention.
Raimi hired him off that debut, and then apparently handed him near-total creative freedom on the sixth Evil Dead film. That is a wild amount of trust, and Vaniček earns it. (Meaghan would also like the record to reflect that several people online have noticed the director looks like a French DJ. Interview footage confirms. Do with that what you will.)
What we felt in Evil Dead Rise, we felt again here. Whoever is choosing these directors is choosing people who love this franchise. Not people who tolerate it or want the paycheque. People who understand what it is for.
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The early Raimi entries are camp perfection, Army of Darkness is its own beautiful animal, and Fede Álvarez’s 2013 Evil Dead is the darkest of the bunch precisely because it rarely lets you laugh. Every other film in the franchise finds moments of levity. Burn finds them too, and they are unmistakably French.
There is a scene early on involving Will’s cremation, and the crematorium employee is so dry, so understated, that Meaghan clocked the director’s nationality from the humor alone. The casket rollers get a moment. It is awful, and it is very funny. If you have seen Le Manoir or the one-take zombie film MadS, you know exactly the register we mean. French filmmakers slide levity into horror without breaking the tension, and Vaniček does it repeatedly.
The Cast Is Small, Unfamiliar, and Excellent
Evil Dead Burn was shot in New Zealand, and the cast reflects that. Souheila Yacoub, the Swiss-French actress you may know from Gaspar Noé’s Climax or Dune: Part Two, plays Alice, our French expat lead. Tandi Wright is Susan, the mother-in-law. Hunter Doohan (yes, from Wednesday) is Joseph, the brother-in-law. Luciane Buchanan plays Thya, Joseph’s girlfriend. Erroll Shand plays Edgar, the father. Maude Davey is Polly, the grandmother. George Pullar plays Will, the dead husband.
Small cast. Mostly lesser-known faces. It works the same way it worked in Rise, and we would like it to keep working forever.
Every man in this movie is terrible. We want to be clear that this is a statement about the characters and not the uniformly great actors. Edgar is instantly hateable, which is the point, and Arthur’s take on that is correct: when an actor gets you into a specific frame of mind about a character within seconds, that actor is doing the job. You can see where Will’s violence came from the moment his father opens his mouth.
Joseph is the real gut punch. We both went in expecting to sympathize with him. We both stopped early. There is a sequence in a car (his girlfriend driving, his Deadite father in the back) where Joseph has a gun in his hands and does approximately nothing with it. You do not have to headshot your dad. Kneecap the man! And then he leaves the car. Arthur leaned over in the theatre and said, out loud, “wow, he sucks.” He was not wrong. What Doohan pulls off is turning a character you think will be sympathetic into a spineless coward you actively want dealt with, and that transition is a performance, not a writing accident.
Thya is who we felt for most, followed closely by Alice. Buchanan gives her real warmth, and then her Deadite version is legitimately scary, all zany, eerie creep. But the MVP is grandma. Maude Davey’s Polly plays a woman with dementia who is convinced Thya is trying to steal her money, and she keeps saying so at the worst possible times.
There is a scene where Thya is locked in the basement, punching a hole through the door, one eye visible through the gap, and Polly wanders up to the door to accuse her of coming back for the cash. It is the funniest moment in the film. Even after she turns, she is still there for levity. We are grateful. (Arthur was quietly hoping she would get destroyed the way the grandmother does in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. She does not. Everybody wins.)
Practical Effects, Real Fire, and a DP Who Knows What He Is Doing
The practical effects are the reason to see this in a theatre. Edgar spends a very long stretch of the film with holes through the side of his head, and there is a kissing scene between him and Susan that exists, we are convinced, for the sole purpose of letting you look through his face. It looks incredible. Probably practical work with a VFX pass on top for the glisten and the drip, but the weight of it is real. There is an entirely burned character later on, and it holds up under the same scrutiny.
The cinematography is by Philip Lozano, who also shot MadS and The Nun II, and once we learned that, the MadS comparison stopped feeling like a coincidence. There is a shot of Edgar standing outside, dead-eyed, with the dog beside him (also dead-eyed) that we will be thinking about for a while. And as you saw in the trailer, the house burns. Ergo, Evil Dead Burn. Those shots are insane.
The Circle of Wise Men and the Franchise Threads
Here is where Burn gets clever. Joseph and Will’s grandfather was a professor who became friends with Professor Raymond Knowby, the man whose tape recordings kick off the entire original film. The grandfather became obsessed with the Necronomicon, with the Kandarian dagger, with finding weapons that could actually kill Deadites, and he joined something called the Circle of Wise Men. Which, if you think about the mage who helps Ash in Army of Darkness, is a lineage of knowledge running down through centuries into this family’s basement.
This is layering we did not expect and really appreciated. Most Evil Dead films hand you characters who have no idea what is happening. They find a passage, they read it aloud, and everything goes to hell.
Burn gives you people who are downstream of someone who knew. Combined with the Jessica character returning from Evil Dead Rise (she bookends that movie; she opens this one, and the cold open at the lake is one of the most upsetting sequences in the film), the universe is starting to feel stitched together on purpose.
Arthur also found that watching Burn made him like Lee Cronin’s The Mummy more, which is a strange thing to say about two different movies, and yet here we are. Cronin executive produced this one. The Mummy is canon. Watch all three back to back, and you are simply in the universe.
Evil Dead Wrath is next, from Francis Galluppi, set in 1972 and currently dated for April 2028. We assume the Circle of Wise Men shows up. We very much hope so.
What Alice Is Actually Fighting
The part we did not see coming is how much this film has to say about abuse.
Alice’s marriage to Will was violent. You can read the shape of it in the first ten minutes, and then the film keeps pulling the floor out from under you, revealing that what you saw was the surface and the rest is much worse. She has to grieve for a man who treated her atrociously. That is the whole problem.
Grief does not care whether the person deserved it, and everyone outside a bad relationship thinks the answer is just leave, just get out, as though that is a thing a person can simply do. Alice has to go through an entire supernatural nightmare to reach the closure that the world would not give her.
Susan gets layers too. Her father allegedly abandoned the family (though what we come to understand is that he may have been protecting them, at least in his own mind), and she was left raising her sister and her mother alone. It hardened her. She clings to Will, her eldest, as the only good thing she ever produced. She is not excusable. She is understandable. Those are different things, and the film knows it.
None of this is delivered with a lecture. Arthur’s read on it is right: the movie never stops to tell you what it means. It layers everything lightly enough that it lands without announcing itself, and you leave with more in your head than you walked in with.
Two post-credit scenes, by the way. Stay for both. The first is levity. The second is a tie-in, and it is the better of the two.
Evil Dead Burn is in theatres now, and it is a great entry in this franchise. Rise got us excited. This one has us fully invested in wherever the Deadites go next.