One day in 1979, childhood friends Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi went to a cabin in rustic Northern Michigan to shoot a horror short. That 32-minute movie, Within the Woods, became the duo’s calling card, earning them enough funding from local business people to shoot a full length film called The Evil Dead, launching a franchise that continues to this day. Most recently, 2023’s Evil Dead Rise moved the Book of the Dead to a big city high rise, far from the franchise’s rustic home.
However, the first trailer for Evil Dead Burn makes it abundantly clear that this time, the chaos will happen in a small, secluded space. Outside of a couple of establishing shots of a large, empty house, the rest of the trailer is an unbroken shot of a woman named Alice (Souheila Yacoub) crawling away from the chaos around her. In addition to people growling and bodies thrown all about, we even get some environmental scares, as when a clock comes crashing to the floor.
According to an official synopsis released with the trailer, Evil Dead Burn follows Alice as she visits the home of her in-laws, only to find that they’ve been transformed into Deadites. Neither the synopsis nor the trailer gives us any indication of who was dumb enough to read from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis to unleash the unholy forces, but given the recent popularity of toxic relationship films like The Drama, we’re guessing its Alice’s husband.
Evil Dead Burn comes from Sébastien Vaniček, the French filmmaker whose 2023 debut Infested managed to combine social commentary with skin-crawling visuals. The latter is a prerequisite for an Evil Dead movie, especially since the 2013 Fede Álvarez reboot Evil Dead stripped all the humor out of the franchise and replaced it with grueling gore. However, the former could be a welcome addition to a movie about Hellish monsters trying to swallow souls, depending on what Vaniček and co-writer Florent Bernard have in mind.
