Evil Dead Rise

Directed by Lee Cronin

Running time: 1hrs37 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

stars in Evil Dead Rise

The idea of “genre” contains an implicit promise to the viewer or reader. It goes something like this: I’m going to tell you a story, and it will be a new story which you haven’t heard before, but it will also be a story that you already know. The thrill of genre lies in the way that your original narrative rubs up against established tropes. If a filmmaker discards so much convention that the work no longer plays as the genre that it claims to be, the result can be disappointing: we all like ice-cream, but when you ordered a steak, that’s the wrong kind of surprise. But when a work breaks with tradition just enough to feel original, while still honouring the genre – that’s thrilling.

All of which preamble is building to me telling you that despite being another resurrection of the Evil Dead horror series, in which not much happens narratively that we haven’t seen a version of before, Evil Dead Rise is a wonderful horror movie and a fantastic example of doing nothing new in a way that feels satisfyingly original.

The prologue takes place in a woodland cabin, honouring both the original films and a certain 19th-century story of the unquiet dead (Wuthering Heights, maybe you’ve heard of it). The sequence establishes the movie’s hair-raising, scalp-stripping bona fides, before the film relocates abruptly to the big city and a likeable cash-strapped family living in a scary condemned apartment block (of the sort that people renting in London will instantly recognise from Rightmove ads cheerily asking £7k a month plus service charge to live in a converted “lower ground” studio previously used as a small coal cellar).

After sitting through fodder like the dreary Halloween Ends, with its will-this-do gestures towards an empty political metaphor, plus the countless lesser imitators of Jordan Peele’s excellent, socially relevant horror, it is quite a relief to encounter a horror movie involving minimal backstory or strained allegory. There’s this Book of the Dead, you see, and if you use it to summon the dead, the dead will be, you know, summoned, and guess what, they aren’t just any dead, they are… the evil dead. That’s about as complicated as it gets, and thank god for that, because it frees up screentime for a zippy smorgasbord of gougings and scrapings and kitchen-scissors-to-the-face-ings.

My favourite sequence (look away if you don’t want any spoilers) was a deadite launching herself onto a hapless victim and tearing out his eyeball with her teeth, before spitting the eyeball in the direction of bystander 2, only for it to plop – of course – into his gaping mouth like an unholy gobstopper. There’s also some good business with a cheese-grater that caused someone sitting near me to visibly shudder, and will probably replay itself in your mind next time you’re whipping up a nice pasta bake topped with delicious cheddar.

EVIL DEAD RISE (2023) Written by Lee Cronin | Shot by Dave Garbett | Edited by Bryan Shaw

Now in UK cinemas