At a certain point in the history of every horror franchise, you learn exactly how far you can stretch the original premise. If you’re A Nightmare on Elm Street, you start mixing in more supernatural and fantasy elements. If you’re Friday the 13th, you give your main guy some changes in scenery. Paranormal Activity started coming up with new gimmicked cameras for every outing. Child’s Play went through multiple (and dramatic) tonal shifts. Halloween had countless reboots. There are only so many times the audience will accept being shown the exact same movie.
One series for which this has historically not been an issue is Evil Dead, which for most of its existence was defined by radical instability. Sam Raimi’s three original films went from straightforward possession horror to a comedic reiteration of the premise to a wild divergence into time-travelling supernatural farce. Not a series, in other words, that has ever been married to a particular approach. Calling it a series at all prior to 2013 felt a little silly. It was Fede Alvarez’s terrible remake that inaugurated Evil Dead to the position of Franchise, and a recent blitz of sequels which cemented it there. The series has doubled its number of entries in the last 13 years, with another one on the way in 2027. Pretty much all of them, in my opinion, are quite bad. This new one, Evil Dead Burn, no less so.
What is an Evil Dead movie? What are the fundamental building blocks? It’s surprisingly difficult to pin down. They all have Deadites, demons from hell who puppeteer dead humans to enact comic torture on their loved ones. The Deadites appear when someone reads from a “Book of the Dead,” either the Necronomicon in the original films or various off-brand versions in the sequels (Evil Dead has some bewildering copyright issues). The action tends to take place in an enclosed and isolated location, like a cabin in the woods. Simple as. Simplicity can breed repetition, but it’s also fertile ground for innovation. If Evil Dead is going to be a franchise, why not do one on a boat in the middle of the ocean? Or in the jungle with a Deadite tiger? Raimi got the ball rolling when he did Medieval Dead. Go nuts.
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