JONESING FOR FILMS

I feel like I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but 2026 is turning into a banner year for horror, with a bumper crop of high quality new features and even a strong second tier of horror movies. In fact, the last few years have felt like a burgeoning period where horror movies are enjoying a renaissance. 2023 saw the resurrection of the Evil Dead franchise with Evil Dead Rise, and now we have gotten another quality sequel in 2026, Evil Dead Burn.

The film is only tangentially related to anything from Evil Dead Rise, featuring an opening scene that ties back to the opening scene of the previous film. After an excursion into the city with the Rise, this one mostly centers the story in a remote family house (not as remote as the cabin in the first two Raimi/Campbell classics) where Alice (Souheila Yacoub), a recent widow, gathers with her deceased husband Will’s (George Pullar) death. Will’s parents, Edgar (Erroll Shand) and Susan (Tandi Wright), along with their son Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan) soon find themselves having to grapple with the Deadites at the family house, discovering that Joseph’s research into his grandfather’s mysterious connection to the Necronomicon and the Kandarian Dagger have put them squared in the crosshairs of the Deadites.

In what is a little bit of a departure from previous Evil Dead movies, there are strained relationships between the people fighting for survival against the Deadites. Edgar and Susan were not particularly fond of Alice, while Alice and Will had difficulties in their marriage that makes mourning his death difficult. But since the marriage trouble was not widely known in the family, her behavior, like showing up for the funeral in sweats, only further alienates her in-laws, especially Susan.

One other element that adds a twist is the presence of Joseph and Will’s grandmother, Polly (Maude Davey), who is wheelchair-bound and struggling with dementia. With Deadite possession apparently being so easy to pass along, so becomes a wild card on both sides of the fight; does granny have the wherewithal to remember that the person locked in the basement shouldn’t be let out? What does a Deadite encountering a damaged brain look like? Interesting questions and nothing good can come of the answers.

The film, directed by Sebastien Vanicek and co-written with Florent Bernard, delights in finding ways to dispense its violence upon the family. There is a lot of creative violence on display and the violence is brutal to the extreme. A Deadite cuts its own head off before passing along the possession to another character. A Deadite drinks hot candlewax in a toast to it’s pending victims. There is a Chekov’s dishwasher full of knives. A character gets skewered in the face by the detachable headrest of a car seat. You get the idea.

Even for an Evil Dead movie, the level of unforgiving brutality is pretty extreme; Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness are the real outliers in this franchise, with the comedy being essentially nonexistent in this chapter. The violence could be a turn off for some people, but for me it just made me wince and cringe a few times and squirm in my seat, no small task.

There is one sequence that is intended to be the standout moment of the entire film, which has the camera focused on Alice as she crawls through the house to find a place to hide as chaos breaks out all around her, with other characters being attacked, fighting, and being thrown everywhere around her in an unbroken take. It is some impressive filmmaking.

I thought the overall story was a little weaker than Evil Dead Rise. There are a few horror movie cliches that the film relies on early on that I could have done without. I’m almost never a fan of the trope in a horror movie when someone hears the voice of a deceased loved one and starts to act like that person may still be miraculously alive, and their investigating that voice or noise ends up being their undoing. Something like that happens fairly early on.

Also, there is a heavy reliance on the lore of the Kandarian dagger and the mythology surrounding the Deadites, but a lot of ambiguity and tangible elements actually being in the story. The film opens with Joseph going through his grandfather’s belongings, which awaken the Deadites, and then later a conversation between him and his mother about throwing out his grandfather’s things in the attic. I expected there to be more a searching for the dagger, but that is sacrificed for more brutality for the characters to endure and when the time comes for the dagger to be needed and found, it is found rather quickly and easily.

Fans of the franchise and fans of horror should enjoy this new chapter in the Evil Dead canon. Others may find elements of it too gory or too violent for their liking. I’m more in the former camp than the latter; though I think Evil Dead Burn is a slightly lesser entry than Evil Dead Rise, I still had a bloody good time.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars