I Just Saw

“Mommy’s with the maggots now…” I just saw Evil Dead Rise and loved it. As an example of its genre and what it’s trying to accomplish as a commercial product, it’s pretty perfect. It was refreshing to see a new Evil Dead movie that absolutely gets what such a film is and how it works. It’s streets ahead of the 2013 remake, Evil Dead, which had some good gore and better motivations on a certain level (it explains why upper-middle-class teenagers would feel compelled to spend time in a disgusting old shack), but lacked the wit, intelligence, freewheeling surrealism, and general fun of the previous films.

The prologue of Evil Dead Rise is fantastic and gets you in the mood right away. It nods to the cabin-in-the-woods concept, and I liked that once again it provides a reason as to why these sexy young things would use their white privilege to spend a weekend getting tetanus in Deliverance country. The cabin this time is well-appointed, a triangular structure by a lake that you can imagine a rich family owning. The sequence cleverly incorporates Wuthering Heights into its scares and gets the Deadites’ dialogue just right, as does the whole film.

The Deadites, the demons who haunt the franchise, are essentially trolls (in the internet’s sense). Evil Dead Rise sums up the entirety of them and their function in a single phrase: they crave absolute chaos. After the prologue, they’re unleashed on a soon-to-be-demolished apartment block when a dimwitted twink (Morgan Davies) rescues the Book of the Dead and some associated vinyl from a cellar unearthed by an earthquake.

Because he’s a hipster he plays the latter on his turntables, and soon the dead rise to terrorise him and his family, including mum Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), aunt Beth (Lily Sullivan), sister Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), and little Kassie (Nell Fisher).

An Evil Dead movie is probably harder to make in 2023 than you might think. You need to walk a fine line between what makes the series attractive to its audience and modern sensibilities, which are more sensitive to (for example) how women and young people are depicted than they were in the 1980s. Evil Dead Rise walks that line with the grace of a tightrope walker, never skimping on the scares but avoiding content that would date it now. (If you’re here for “assault by foliage”, you might be disappointed.)

The Evil Dead films are what I think of as “pure” horror. For comparison, “pure” comedy is when every single aspect of the piece is in service of gags, from plot logic to character motivations. Any of that stuff can be changed or eschewed for a joke. (Think Airplane! or Scary Movie.) “Pure” horror, then, is where the story is a vehicle for showing you macabre ideas and images. Everything else, including an effectively used ghost story about a bank clerk, religious iconography, and so on, is just paraphernalia.

A bad movie would have bogged itself down in crappy lore that no one cares about, and plot convolutions that are trite at best, moronic at worst. Evil Dead Rise spends that time and effort instead on its setting, pace, and set pieces. The characters are well-sketched enough that I wouldn’t have minded seeing them in something more mainstream, which is high praise for a splatter film or “ghoulie”, as they used to be called.

The film goes for the surrealistic nightmare fuel and jet-black, almost slapstick humour that made the series popular. There’s a brilliant sequence, possibly the best in the film, where a series of gory killings is shown through a spy hole. The sequence is basically knockabout farce as filtered through horror, a vaudeville act with dismemberment instead of pies to the face.

There are many nods to the previous films of course, such as an ingenious, de-sexualised reworking of the infamous “assault by foliage” scene. The splatter is gooey and gross in all the right ways, ditto the foul-mouthed, taunting imprecations of the Deadites. This is perfectly choreographed mayhem, climaxing with a monster effect that’s far and away my favourite in a long time; it suggests that the filmmakers have studied Hieronymous Bosch’s landscapes of hell. It’s giddy, giggly, splattery fun, nasty and silly and smart all at once, with excellent use of pacing and economical scripting.

If you don’t like splatter, don’t go. Evil Dead Rise goes all out on the grue and is designed to make you cringe. It’s executed brilliantly, and to paraphrase a line from Roger Ebert’s review of the original Exorcist, if that doesn’t make it a noble film, it makes it an effective one.