Ethel Cain, the "Irony Epidemic", and Evil Dead Burn

At an advanced screening of Evil Dead Burn, the newest installment to the franchise, I left pissed off. Not because of the movie. Although, my expectations going in weren’t the highest. It wasn’t a highly anticipated movie for me. I blame the trailers and visual promo.

Between the ironic laughter and the ringtones sounding off after watching guts splatter across screen, I wasn’t even in the mood for the post-movie loitering outside of the theater afterwards.

This is a return to a topic that I lightly explored in a previous newsletter in discussion with Obsession and Backrooms. Is laughter ruining horror movies? The answer can be as subjective as the laughter in question. Yet, there’s no avoiding the chuckling elephant in the room theater. We are in an irony epidemic, and no one took Ethel Cain seriously when she blasted this on Tumblr.

Cain took to Tumblr in 2024 to vent about her constant frustration with the ironic way that fans engage with her art. She said, "we are in an irony epidemic. there is such a loss of sincerity and everything has to be a joke at all times.". She went on to use the example of one comment that references the abuse and cannibalism of her album:

"yes you ate that like isaiah ate ethel"

As we watch a movie, we’re already picturing the memes that can be made out of a single scene. We imagine which lines will become a TikTok audio set for a trend. Then there’s Letterboxd, where you find more one-liners looking for a laugh than thoughtful comments on the movie at hand. It’s all fun and games until we’re in a loneliness epidemic and a literacy crisis. Where does the irony end and the engagement begin?

Evil Dead wasn’t always a tactful franchise with thematic storytelling. I mean, it was conceptualized and directed by a college kid. It’s quirky, rambunctious, and maniacal. Since the 2013 installment, the franchise started to embrace craftsmanship in a different way. We’re dealing with familial dynamics, trauma, and autonomy at a heightened scale. Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 are slapstick comedies set against the backdrop of a horror movie. But a movie like Evil Dead Burn is a family drama from the perspective of an abused woman.

This standalone sequel to the two most recent Evil Dead stars Souheila Yacoub as Alice who suddenly becomes a widow after her husband’s drunk driving accident. She was never accepted into Will’s family completely, though. She’s French with pink hair, a chain smoking habit, and an aversion to traditional American family values. In his death, her proximity to them is forced closer to the point of suffocation.

The golden boy they remember is the opposite of the violence he inflicted on Alice. She still feels the scars he left on her body and her mind. This same anger and violence soon infects the whole family for a reason that’s kind of clear but ultimately gets steamrolled by Alice’s story of survival. Through it all, laughter was tickling my ear. And I hate being tickled.

Like I said in my last confrontation of this subject, I’m not here to police peoples’ responses to discomfort. I think it’s worth challenging, though, in the light of our current society where “it’s not that deep”. Men applauded themselves for empathizing with a woman after watching Obsession when women are almost always the protagonists in horror. But I’m starting to think we, as a society, still aren’t taking the genre seriously.

Horror should make you feel. Horror should make you confront your own discomfort. And horror should make you think. But for too long, it’s been understood as a genre with cheap thrills and gags. The mainstream attention that it’s been getting lately isn’t fooling me either. The general population go to horror to be scared and are let down 75% of the time, because that’s not all the horror genre sets to achieve.

The emotion delivered from Hunter Doohan as Joseph was palpable and heart-breaking. He’s watching his family rip each other apart literally. Yet, somehow his gaze to the tragedy off-screen garnered empty laughs from the crowds just looking to react something. And me? I was taken out of yet another emotionally charged scene in a horror movie.