Writer-director Sébastien Vaniček weighs in on setting the Deadite saga ablaze with a franchise first and a “cathartic” scene.
Courtesy of StudioCanal.
Anticipated by a trailer dishwasher scene to rival the Evil Dead Rise grater (IYKYK), Evil Dead Burn has blazed into cinemas with a family reunion from hell for fans of the demonic saga.
Behind the latest chapter in Sam Raimi’s Deadite movie series is Sébastien Vaniček, whose excellent 2023 debut Infested — think giant spiders looking to kill anything that moves in a Paris banlieue apartment complex — put him on the map of horror directors to watch.
Vaniček, who reunited with his Infested co-screenwriter Florent Bernard on Evil Dead Burn, joins the ranks of filmmakers who’ve investigated gender-based violence through horror.To mark the movie’s release, the director sat down with Screensphere to discuss breaking into a well-established, beloved universe, playing subtle with central themes and giving fans what they want but might not know they need.
“When you are entering such a huge franchise with a lot of fans, and this guy you respect so much, who’s Sam Raimi, you have to lead your battle, you have to fight for your ideas,” he said.
“I know that if I have to do an Evil Dead, that would be this movie. And if it’s slightly different, it’s not my movie anymore, and I don’t want to do it.”
Produced by Raimi and Evil Dead Rise’s Lee Cronin, Burn is an incendiary survival tale for protagonist Alice (Souheila Yacoub), a French woman whose abusive husband, Will (George Pullar), just died.
Courtesy of StudioCanal.
The film takes place in the aftermath of the funeral, with Alice stuck with Will’s judgemental, dysfunctional family — his parents Susan (Tandi Wright) and Edgar (Erroll Shand), his younger brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan), his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan), and the movie’s MVP, grandma Polly (Maude Davey).
Vaniček managed to inject the American film series with some French extremity while tracing clear connections to previous instalments. In Burn, the unmistakable lake setting ties in with the flash-forward prologue in Rise, making Vaniček’s own Evil Dead the chapter which most openly addresses its place within the larger canon.
“That was just a huge playground to play with and put a lot of different things in,” he said of sneaking Easter eggs into his film. “And sometimes they’re really, really hidden. But you know that fans will see them and they will talk about them.”
One of such scenes is a statement from the director himself, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment that bridges the gap between Raimi’s slapstick horror fun and the new ‘elevated’ instalments with a hefty dose of tongue-in-cheek.
“Fans have seen so many movies where the chainsaw ends the final boss, and they are used to it, but what if you end the final boss with a jackhammer? That’s something you’ve never seen before,” Vaniček said of leaving Ash Williams’ weapon of choice behind.
The chainsaw would have been “less cathartic” than the jackhammer, he continued.
“That’s where I trusted myself, being like, those fans, they are smart people, they are in love with this franchise, they want to be disturbed, they want to be shocked by something, so how do I do that?” he said.
“I could have just picked the jackhammer,” he added, “But the fact that I wanted to show that there’s a chainsaw which is going to fall is like [saying], ‘I know you don’t want that. You don’t know it yet, but I know you don’t want it.’ So it’s also a mark of respect, you know?”
Courtesy of StudioCanal.
The profound respect Vaniček has for the Evil Dead fandom extends to his crew and actors, last but not least Dax the dog, the good boy who plays Max, Will’s family’s German Shepherd. Like Infested, Evil Dead Burn features a difficult scene to stomach for animal lovers, but it’s conducive to give Dax his big star moment and introducing “the first Deadite dog in an Evil Dead movie”.
Going for a grisly dog death, Vaniček knew he had to “make it count”, with the intention of making Max “powerful and kinda cool”.
“I’m a huge animal lover, and I’m a huge insect lover. I’m a lover of all types of lives, and that’s also why I want to make [animals] big stars of the movie,” the director said.
From Max’s gruesome demise to a “horrible”, squelching kiss that will have you questioning your inclinations, Evil Dead Burn doesn’t shy away from going for the jugular in some intense sequences.
The franchise has become synonymous for practical horror, and Burn is no exception. The goriest, grossest Evil Dead so far, Vaniček’s no-holds-barred movie features a long take of a Deadite domestic fight for Alice and her in-laws, with stunts being tossed around the dining room amid explosions and debris.
Courtesy of StudioCanal.
“We just removed the cables in [post-production] but otherwise everything was there,” he said, adding they shot the oner for a total of 13 takes.
“It’s really, really difficult, but that’s also the essence of cinema, because everybody has to be at the peak of their work.”
And if Evil Dead Burn definitely delivers on a visual level, the thematic unity it strives for occasionally falters.
Despite Yacoub’s powerhouse turn as Alice, Burn doesn’t particularly stand out from other horror about male violence. Vaniček acknowledged the limitations he and Bernard worked with when putting pen to page to outline the complex dynamic between Alice and Susan, two women with direct experience of abuse but extremely different views.
“That’s basically the opposition of two points of view on what women should be in society, the place of a woman in a family,” the writer-director said of a confrontation scene that almost bleeds into victim blaming aimed at Susan.
“And since we are two men writing the script, we didn’t want to have an answer and be like, ‘Oh, a woman should be like this or that’. We just wanted to have two points of view that are in conflict with each other,” he said, praising the “subtlety” of both Yacoub and Wright’s performances.
A cross-generational outlook is also cast upon the men in the family, with Evil Dead Burn cutting deeper when exploring how the cycles of toxic masculinity perpetuate. Counterbalancing Edgar and Will, Doohan’s Joseph is a nuanced ‘nice guy’ type who bottles up his rage — “the only thing he learned from his father and his brother,” argued Vaniček — until boiling point.
Courtesy of StudioCanal.
We’ve come a long way since that regrettable rape tree scene in The Evil Dead, with 2013’s Evil Dead, 2023’s Rise and now Burn incorporating authentic female-fronted stories, rewriting the Necronomicon playbook and pairing kills that have you squirming in your seat with necessary conversations.
In the spirit of this renaissance infusing new death into the franchise, we’d love to see another first after Max the Doggite — an Evil Deadhelmed by a woman. Vaniček has already ruled out a return, after all.
“I won’t be up, because I think when you are doing an Evil Dead movie, it’s only one time, and you have to respect that,” he said of directing a Burn sequel, but he’s “happy to share” his characters and pass the dagger onto the next filmmaker.
Evil Dead Burn is in cinemas now.