Sam Raimi’s "Evil Dead" franchise has flourished for more than four decades with movies, a streaming series, comics, and a stage musical. Now there's a new feature film called "Evil Dead Rise," in cinemas and rated R for strong, bloody horror violence and gore, as well as language. Consider yourself warned.
Origin story
In 1981, Sam Raimi forever changed the horror landscape when he unleashed the Deadites and his unique brand of over the top horror with "The Evil Dead". The franchise created its own lore: there's a book of the dead containing ancient Kandarian burial rites and funerary incantations that if you read them aloud, awakens demons that will possess the living.
Raimi explained in the press notes, "I think what's unique about it is that they have a nasty sense of humor about themselves and they exist not to exist like vampires, to drink blood so that they can live, but they exist to torment people and to create terror. And that's really a great playground for filmmakers and actors alike."
It's a playground his star and longtime friend Bruce Campbell absolutely thrived in as Ash.
"'Evil Dead' movies are more over-the-top than your average movie," Campbell commented in the press notes. "More blood, more carnage, more mayhem, more suffering. It's more of the full-monty experience."
From its humble origins as an extremely low-budget and completely indie horror film, "The Evil Dead" has left its indelible mark on horror fans as well as filmmakers like Lee Cronin.
"My dad showed them to me when I was eight or nine years old. 'The Evil Dead' and 'Evil Dead, 2,' rented VHS, watched back to back at nighttime," Cronin recalled during a Zoom interview. "I had no idea what I was experiencing. He had no fear showing it to me, because my house was a house of horror lovers. And, yeah, it left its mark. I think it's still leaving its mark on me right now. I can't really escape."
'Evil Dead Rise'
Cronin is directing the latest entry in the franchise, "Evil Dead Rise", and it’s a job that comes with a bloody massive responsibility.
"There's some pretty serious shoulders to stand upon in terms of what was there before," Cronin admitted. "But in order to tell a good scary story and to make a good horror movie, you need to hunt down great characters."
Like single mom Ellie, played by Alyssa Sutherland. Gone are the college kids escaping to a cabin for spring break. Now we have Ellie struggling to keep her family together as she faces eviction from her condemned apartment. But then one of her kids accidentally unleashes those pesky Kandarian demons and Mom gets possessed.
"It was really fun, I'm not going to lie," Sutherland said with an enormous grin. "But, I also really felt like Deadite Ellie was having the time of her life, and so I think it was important for me to have the time of my life as well."
Diving in with gusto is exactly what an "Evil Dead" movie demands.
"I think you've got to be a little bit fearless if you're going to make a movie like this," Cronin said. "If you second guess yourself too much, I think that you might lose the energy of what a movie like this requires."
And he does endow the film with an energy that keeps ramping up to deliver more Deadite trauma and gore.
Lily Sullivan plays Beth, who has to fight the Deadites.
"The beauty of horror from an acting point of view, it's like an invigorating challenge," Sullivan said. "You have to push the boundaries of expression. It needs to be the biggest. And also so nice to shoot in chronological order, the Beth at the beginning and the Beth in the later half of the film — it's like she goes primal. She finds that inner roar, which is just so fun to play."
I confess, I bring a lot of expectations to my beloved "Evil Dead" franchise and while Cronin delivers big on the practical effects and gross-out gore he’s not really interested in the unique brand of "splatstick" — splatter gore and slapstick comedy — that Raimi is so deftly skilled at. So I did miss that. But then maybe it is wiser not to try and imitate the master.
I do love that the franchise gives young directors a chance to play on a studio film with a real budget. If you happened to attend the 2015 Horrible Imaginings Film Festival here in San Diego you would have been treated to Cronin’s award-winning short film "Ghost Train", where he displayed a love for production detail, something he carries over effectively into the creepily rendered world of the "Evil Dead Rise."
"Talking about character, the apartment had to kind of be both the cabin and the forest," Cronin said referencing the origin of the franchise. "And there's more than just the apartment. There's an underground parking lot and there's a bit of a vault and there's various other little places that make up parts of this building. The elevator is like a character in its own right. And we kind of hunted down and did a lot of research to kind of find the right look. But we talked about 'Rosemary's Baby' quite a bit. Just the atmosphere of the corridors in that apartment. Maybe we touched into 'The Shining' a little bit when we looked at references as well and just wanted it to feel really lived in and history. Because part of the story is that the book is below this building. So the building had to feel authentic right, in order to believe where the book has come from. And I think the art department team did a really incredible job. They built me an incredible set that I just destroyed with blood and gore and action and shotgun shells and all of these different things."
Sutherland said she learned a lot working with Cronin, "Lee introduced to me this idea that horror films are actually very musical. There's a rhythm to horror that I wasn't aware of, and it was so cool to incorporate that then into your performance and take that on of like, okay, now I know the beats of a scare, and now I can play within those beats of scaring. And I wasn't aware of that."
And the beats for "Evil Dead Rise" have a certain operatic quality. If Raimi went for a deliciously bonkers, Looney Tunes epic-ness, then Cronin takes a more elegant approach to the gore.
"I wanted the gore and the blood to be beautiful in a way, despite the fact that it's so terrifying," Cronin said. "But to be like it's hard managing liquids on set. It's a challenging thing. It really is. But it was something that was important to me, that there was a certain beauty to how it was presented. And I think that's something maybe we managed to achieve to just about wrangle the character that is blood into shape in the story."
Cronin takes the "Evil Dead" franchise out of the woods and into new territory, and that’s probably a good approach for keeping the undead alive and kicking for a new generation of horror fans.
And in case you want to see a little of "Evil Dead: The Musical," here's a story I did when it was playing in San Diego. Groovy.
