Dead ites Risin g

Director Lee Cronin brings gross-out scares and old-school terror to the latest installment in the Deadite-fueled franchise with Evil Dead Rise.

BY AARON SAGERS

“Make sure there are scary Deadites, and use the book.”

When Lee Cronin assumed writing and directing duties for Evil Dead Rise, those were Sam Raimi’s specific requests.

Of course, there were other ingredients for the fifth installment of The Evil Dead horror franchise —launched in 1981 by director Raimi, producer Rob Tapert, and Bruce Campbell—such as blood, gore, chainsaws, and boomsticks. But then the Irish filmmaker and lifelong Evil Dead fan reveals to us he had his own mission: “To bring you in, wind you up, and then punch you in the face for an hour.”

Handpicked by Raimi, who was impressed by Cronin’s short film Ghost Train and first feature, The Hole in the Ground, filming began on Evil Dead Rise in New Zealand in June 2021. With all three serving as producers, Tapert joined the shoot on the ground while Raimi and Campbell supported his vision from afar.

“They wanted it to be something different,” Cronin says, and Raimi advised him to use his instincts and “do what you got to do.” What he had to do was “take it somewhere new.”

Cronin calls the original film, remake/sequel Evil Dead II (1987), and the Fede Álvarez-directed “re-imagining” Evil Dead (2013) the “O.G. cabin in the woods teenager stories” (1992’s Army of Darkness and the 2015–18 TV series Ash vs. Evil Dead were sequels to part two, focused on Campbell’s iconic Ash Williams). So he wanted a “different angle” while keeping the “gorefest and rollercoaster ride of horror” elements.

To do so, he’s relocated the action to an urban domestic setting in a run-down Los Angeles apartment building. Rather than teens, it’s a family reunion between Beth (Lily Sullivan), who travels with a band and doesn’t have her life together, and sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), a newly single cool mom to three kids (Morgan Davies, Gabrielle Echols, Nell Fisher). Of course, there’s the evil force waiting to be discovered in a vault and a book bound in human skin that unleashes a whole lot of hell.

“I think that placing horror in recognizable domestic circumstances is often a really great shortcut to connect with an audience, and I thought it’d be very interesting if we could take the malevolence of the Deadites into the city,” Cronin says. “Sam, Rob, and Bruce, being the protectors of all that is Evil Dead, were on board instantly and liked taking it into that space.”

Even if the cabin is mostly absent from this story, Rise fits within the series continuity. Cronin points to the scene in Army of Darkness when Ash encounters three books bound in flesh. That stuck with him, and he wrote with the idea that all three—the Naturom Demonto, Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, and simply, the Book of the Dead in Rise—exist in the same universe. There’s one in Raimi’s world, another in Alvarez’s, and a third here.

“They have slightly different edges to them in terms of what they can do, and there’s a little subtle change or two to the incantations,” Cronin says. Rise’s Book of the Dead is a “bastard cousin” to the others, with Celtic influences, Cronenbergian sketches, sharp teeth, and veins. This book also creates a pathway to “open up the door for more Evil Dead stories moving forward by changing it up.”

Regarding those incantations and atmospherics, Cronin reveals that Campbell visited the sound sessions in Ireland and brought a set of original Evil Dead audio files recorded on Nagra reel-to-reel, which they incorporated “so it’s all wrapped up inside the movie.”

Aside from books of evil and mocking Deadites “who want to have fun and play” by possessing humans, the series of films is still best known for chainsaws, shotguns (a.k.a. “boomsticks”), and Ash. Campbell has appeared in every Evil Dead, even in the 2013 film where Jane Levy starred as protagonist Mia, but Ash cameoed in a post-credits scene.

Sullivan’s blood-soaked Beth wears a blue denim shirt reminiscent of Ash’s, but he is not to be found in Rise Yet she is an imperfect hero, just like Ashley J. Williams.

“I remember having this discussion with Rob Tapert,” recalls Cronin. “When you watch the original, Ash is