Crew
Director – Sebastien Vanicek, Screenplay – Florent Bernard & Sebastien Vanicek, Producers – Sam Raimi & Rob Tapert, Photography – Philip Lozano, Music – Double Danger, Visual Effects Supervisor – Thierry Onillon, Visual Effects – Cousin Bizarre (Supervisor – Thibault Jouhannet), Dark Army Studio Co. Ltd, Dusk, Hoop Visual Effects Ltd, Mac Guff (Supervisors – Thomas Eid & David Uystpruyst), Mathematic (Supervisor – Julien Lambert), Trimaran (Supervisor – Savitri Joly Gonfard) & Whales Visual Effects, Special Effects Supervisor – Brendon Durey, Makeup Effects Design – Jane O’Kane, Production Design – Nick Connor. Production Company – Ghost House Pictures.
Cast
Souhelia Yacoub (Alice), Tandi Wright (Susan Price), Hunter Doohan (Joseph Price), Errol Shand (Edgar Price), Luciane Buchanan (Thya), Maude Davey (Polly Price), George Pullar (Will Price), Greta van den Brink (Jessica), Alyssa Sutherland (Ellie Bixler), Laura MacGregor (Manager)
Plot
Will Price and his French wife Alice manage a restaurant together, but he is controlling of her and physically abusive. After they argue, he drives away but crashes after seeing the Deadite Jessica on the road. As Will lies in the burning car, Jessica approaches, enacting rituals. Following the funeral, Will’s father Edgar goes in to see the body one last time, only for it to return to life. Alice attends a tension-laden family dinner during which Edgar starts to succumb and then stabs the dog with a fork. As Edgar is rushed off to hospital, he starts to transform into a Deadite and attacks them in the car. This spreads to infect others of the family. Soon, Alice finds herself in a desperate fight for survival as Deadites overrun the house, searching for the Kandarian Dagger, an occult item found by Will’s grandfather that is the only weapon able to defeat them.
The Evil Dead (1981) is a cult film, a ferociously original homemade zombie/possession film that put the names of director Sam Raimi and star Bruce Campbell on the map. Raimi and Campbell continued with two better budgeted sequels The Evil Dead II (1987) and Army of Darkness (1992). As part of the spate of 1970s/80s remakes that came out in the 2000s/10s, the original was remade as Evil Dead (2013). Around the same time, Bruce Campbell appeared in the tv series Ash vs Evil Dead (2015-8). The remake was then followed by a further sequel Evil Dead Rise (2023) and now by Evil Dead Burn.
The new director coming in is the French Sebastien Vanicek who gained reasonable international acclaim with his debut film Infested (2023) about the tenants of a French apartment building fighting off an infestation of spiders. Vanicek and his co-writer Florent Bernard deliver the script. The film is produced by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, his regular producing partner ever since the first The Evil Dead, while series star Bruce Campbell and Evil Dead Rise director Lee Cronin are both listed as an executive producers. Evil Dead Burn holds continuity to the other films with mention of The Necronomicon in the prologue, the appearance of Bruce Campbell’s photo amongst the family portraits in the house, and a surprise reappearance of Alyssa Sutherland from Evil Dead Rise after the end credits.
I felt a lack of enthusiasm for Evil Dead Burn before sitting down to watch. It feels that now the Evil Dead franchise has joined the same place that the recent revivals of the Halloween and Scream franchises– at its worst, efforts like Exorcist: Believer (2023) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) – have done. That is to say, they are excavating franchises that are over forty years old but do little more than bring back the stars of the original but fail utterly in either replicating the essence or cultural mood that made either work a classic in the first place.
Evil Dead Burn didn’t do much for me at all during the opening scenes. The prologue with two fishermen on a lake as the Deadite Jessica rises from the water felt unexceptional, as did the scenes where George Pullar drives off after an argument with Souhelia Yacoub and has a crash when Jessica appears in the road. The idea of an Evil Dead film set around a happening party scene cast with twentysomethings and rap on the soundtrack drowning out the dialogue seemed about as far as one could get from Sam Raimi’s original conception.
I was fairly cynical about Evil Dead Burn until around the 35-minute mark. Here we get a dinner table scene where Souhelia Yacoub is forced to undergo an excruciating questioning about her motivations and plans for the restaurant, while father Errol Shand sits at one end of the table undergoing Deadite transformation unnoticed by everybody until he suddenly picks up a fork and stabs the family dog. This is followed by an even more nutzoid scene where Shand is rushed off to hospital and suddenly becomes possessed in the car, resulting in an intensive fight scene where he tries to stab Luciane Buchanan with a pair of medical scissors while she is driving and then cuts off her fingertips in the car door and impales her through the head with the prongs of the car seat headrest.
From that point, Sebastien Vanicek floors it and Evil Dead Burn rarely lets up until the end credits run. The film expands out from the contained cabin location of the first two Evil Deads or the apartment of Evil Dead Rise and mostly takes place around a two-and-a-half storey house, while the characters and possessed are all members of the family across a range of ages.
What you can now call the second trilogy of Evil Dead films have been much more soberly serious than the increasingly cartoonish tone of Sam Raimi’s original trilogy. They have uniform lighting and colour schemes that wash everything out to a desaturated grey-brown. That said, Evil Dead Burn could be said to be the one that most approaches the comic-bookish tone Sam Raimi began on the original and perfected with The Evil Dead II.
This goes full tilt with assorted scenes with Luciane Buchanan drinking lit candle wax; Hunter Doohan being impaled on a dishwasher; the rather blackly funny scenes with elderly Maude Davey being dragged around on her stairlift; Souhelia Yacoub trying to escape down a chimney while having to gore the Deadites pursuing her with a weed whacker; or the climactic scenes where she is pursued across a building scene by the partial skeleton of her late husband fighting him off with a jackhammer.
Rarely does any scene go by without someone being thrown around, shoved against or through the wall or ceiling happening in the background. The most whacked and out there scene is where father Errol Shand stands outside the house and shoots himself in the head from multiple angles – only for it to have no effect at all. About the point where Souhelia Yacoub is being dragged around the ceiling of a room while being strangled with bubble wrap, the film becomes an exhaustingly brutal one that you can only cheer.
My other major issue with the reboot trilogy is the lack of any Ash figure. Evil Dead Rise made a big issue out of being an all-girl take on the films (which wasn’t strictly correct) – now all three entries of the second trilogy have now given us female leads. No issue with doing this, more so the characterisation where each of them are simply guest stars of the show filling out the role of the Final Girl, in effect. None of them can be said to have taken on the role of kicker of demonic butt in the same way that Bruce Campbell did, let alone ever approximated the flip delivery and corny one-liners that made him a cult star. It may be either a case of the focus on a less cartoonish approach or else the recognition that nobody can fill Bruce Campbell’s shoes. In the equivalent role here, Vanicek has brought Swiss/Tunisian actress Souhelia Yacoub who has been gaining a name in French film and tv since the late 2010s. Unfortunately, Souhelia makes a flat and uncharismatic lead who gives the impression she has turned up to deliver the role she been hired for and has nothing more to offer than that.
Trailer here