Back in 1981, 20-year-old director Sam Raimi begged and borrowed a budget before chasing his childhood friend Bruce Campbell through the woods to capture a gore-spattered tale of horror, demon-possessed trees and zombie-esque “Deadites”.
Cult classic The Evil Dead went on to spawn three sequels and a three-season TV series. And now, as if raised by an evil Book of the Dead, it’s back… with a twist.
Now streaming on Showmax, Evil Dead Rise leaves behind the woods for an old apartment building, where single mom Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) and her three kids are about to have the most twisted family reunion ever with Ellie’s sister Beth (Lily Sullivan).
For writer and director Lee Cronin, it’s a return to a familiar space. “My introduction to that world was when my father showed me The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II on VHS, back-to-back. I was nine years old at the time. There was a storm and the power went out, so it was a very particular experience,” he reveals.
What The Evil Dead did for sharing a cabin in the woods with your mates, Lee wanted to carry across into eerie, rundown apartment buildings. “We are in a world where people live in increasingly small spaces. There’s a lot of horror just outside our doors and I wanted it to come and knock right on the front door, which is why I developed the peephole point-of-view,” says Lee.
Lee loosely based the children in the film on his own nieces and nephews. “When I thought about the story being about family, I knew that children had to be in the story,” says Lee. “I didn’t want to just take the obvious family unit; I wanted there to be that reality of existing cracks and fissures, which I thought made it easier to then dig fingers into and poke around, with some of the horror springing from that … Being an Evil Dead movie meant that no matter what, some of those kids had to get possessed, and that would lead to even greater consequences. I really wanted to see what would happen with ‘Deadite’ kids [the demonically possessed version]. Rip a kid’s limb off and throw it across a space and, for the audience, all bets are off at that point and anything could happen.”
Since they were ripping off arms, special effects supervisor Brendan Durey had to come up with a brand-new stage blood formula for Evil Dead Rise. His team mixed over 6 500 litres of it – around1 300+ bodies’ worth, since a typical human body contains around five litres. His team also had to figure out how to pump that blood out of severed limbs.
“You’ve got to tune it to the right viscosity by using accumulators, pressure pots and tubes to force the blood out of different nozzles. It’s about trying to assess how it works, and then get the tests in front of Lee to establish what’s in his head and what he wants it to look like,” says Brendan, whose team tested as much as they could before shooting started, since covering actors in icky, sticky blood meant long cleanup sessions later.
“The difficult part was the blood – how sticky it is and how it gets everywhere,” explains actor Morgan Davies, who plays Danny. “Unless you’re careful, whatever hair it touches, on your head or your body, it’s going to rip out.”
Apparently you really can get blasé about blood. Morgan adds, “We have arms and heads, skin and guts all over the set, and it becomes the most normal part of life. I was already kind of desensitised, because I’m a horror fan, but it does become different when you’re holding a dismembered arm. Even then it was, like, totally normal. And I bugged everybody, because I really wanted to keep my prosthetic arm.”
Sam and Bruce executive produce this time. “What’s unique about the Evil Dead universe is that these spirits that possess the living have a nasty sense of humour about themselves,” says Sam. “That’s a great playground for filmmakers and actors alike.”
Sam is confident that his gory brainchild is in safe hands. “Lee understands being the great puppet master – knowing where the audience will be, and not giving them the scare, but pulling them in and then giving it to them when they least expect it.”
Audiences agree: Evil Dead Rise is the highest-grossing film of the series. The 18 HLV film was also nominated for Best Horror Movie at the 2024 Critics Choice Awards, where Alyssa was up for Best Actress in a Horror Movie and Best Villain.
“I think great horror is something that you watch and then it follows you home, when you turn the lights out,” says Lee.
Stream Evil Dead Rise on Showmax now:
www.showmax.com/watch/asset/movies/evil-dead-rise/6b1f9e93-654c-3959-aa4b-03b3c777750f
