Reel & Make Believe | Evil Dead Burn

by Stef Nunez

When our horror podcast was up and running on a weekly basis, something I said very often was “They can’t all be bangers”. There are movies you love, you like, you dislike, and there are movies you dislike in a way that feels almost personal.

In honor of Evil Dead Burn now being available to stream on digital, I have to be honest and say that on first viewing this film is the latter for me. And perhaps that might need the disclaimer: I LOVE Evil Dead.

Not casually. Not in the “yeah, I’ve seen the movies once or twice” way. Evil Dead is a franchise that has burrowed so deeply into my horror-loving brain that I have very specific ideas on what makes it “work”. Ultimately, that’s the problem I have with Burn.

I’m not going to sit here and do a slow crawl through all of the movies (on this post, anyway) because I’ll lose you along the way, but I do have to start by saying Evil Dead 2 is a perfect horror movie in my eyes. Feel free to drop a comment to the contrary below, it won’t change my mind. This movie is a damn near perfect distillation of everything I want from horror. It’s absurd, grotesque, frightening in concept, and low key hilarious. Bruce Campbell, with his facial expressions and silent machismo, is one of the best people to ever be put in front of a camera and Evil Dead 2 is where the franchise really discovered that particularly spicy flavor of camp that would become so essential to its identity.

So, I’ve seen every one of the newer ED movies on premiere night in the theater, and I have to say leaving Burn was the first time I was like, “I don’t know if I liked that.”

The director, Sébastien Vaniček, lays a heavy hand of French Extremism over this film, tipping the franchise into increasingly disgusting territory, like his primary objective was to look at the previous movies and say, “Okay, but what if we make it MORE?”

More blood. More grotesque imagery. More brutality. More things to make the audience physically recoil.

Don’t get me wrong, I love gore, and the gore in Burn is top notch. The gross-out factor isn’t my complaint here at all. If anything, this is the area where the movie succeeds most. To keep things predominantly spoiler free, I will just expand by saying I prefer that gore to be fantastical, ridiculous, over-the-top and unrealistic. If you need a trigger warning for something other than gore, here it is: Domestic violence & Dog death.

I just don’t personally want such heavy material in my Evil Dead. I’m a fan who wants monsters, demons & the impossible. I don’t want realism. Give me a demon mocking the final girl while wearing somebody’s skin and a chainsaw through the chest. Keep the reality away from me, please.

When you look at this and the obvious nods + intentional disregard to fan service opportunities, it just feels like a personal snub from Vaniček. Especially considering this film follows Lee Cronin’s (Rise), and he is so clearly a fanboy of the ED lore. Like, hello, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is DRIPPING with it, it’s basically fanfiction.

Even though they feature the house from Ash vs. Evil Dead, the rules of the lore feel loose here and the mythology underdeveloped. They’re sitting on a goldmine of research and artifacts that end up half-stuffed in a garbage bag and largely unused. Perhaps all of the chaos is laying groundwork for something that will make sense later, but I hate movies that act simply as a bridge to the next one.

I also low-key hated every character except for the girlfriends. There’s a rampant passivity of abuse by the parents, which has led to highly undesirable characteristics in the sons. That’s putting it nicely, basically I wanted to fist fight everyone…including the big bad at the end. Because even though I’m 5’1”, I could’ve taken that guy.

Maybe I’ll change my mind after watching it a second time, but for the future I don’t need Evil Dead to get darker, more realistic. I need it to remember why it was fun to be afraid in the first place.

Stef Nuñez (she/they) is Co-Editor-In-Chief of Sage Cigarettes Magazine as well as (former) unhinged co-host of A Ghost in the Magazine & The Annegirls Podcast. She is a feral horror mami and artist who specializes in tiny and/or strange pieces. When she’s not working her 9-5 or posting here, you can find her haunting her craft room in Raleigh, NC.