Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Adams | Film | July 10, 2026
Rev them chainsaws to wish the Deadites a happy 45th birthday, as the franchise birthed from the sick mind of demonic maestro Sam Raimi in 1981 shrieks this year straight into the hellfires of middle-age with all the flaming fury of a thousand perimenopauses. Which isn’t to call the latest entry in the Kandarian canon—Evil Dead Burn, out this weekend, what a coincidence—a mid-life crisis, exactly. But one does walk out of it—in a pummeled daze, it must be said—wondering just what one wants from this franchise. Any of the goofy Stooges-esque humor that Raimi and his chin-forward star Bruce Campbell slathered across their three films (and three seasons of Ash vs Evil Dead)—peaking with the greatest horror-comedy ever made aka 1987’s Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn—has been obliterated by the “Nasty” half of “Video Nasties.” The thin line between “yuks” and “yuck” has all but been abandoned. (Along with all “Hope,” sorry Obama.)
Indeed, assault-by-tree-limbs-aside, those early movies seem now practically Rated-PG-quaint, a doily on sweet ol’ Henrietta’s mantle, in comparison to the seared-flesh hell that French director Sébastien Vanicek unleashes here. Hired off the buzz from his super-squirmy 2023 spider-horror-flick Infested, Vanicek is of the age where his formative horror films must have been the brutal obscenities known now as the New French Extremity—brutal blackened-heart films like Martyrs and Haute Tension. And it shows. If your idea of a punchline is watching a character have their face mashed into the smashed remnants of where their girlfriend’s face used to be, then have I got your new favorite comedy here!
I’m not exactly retiring to my fainting couch—sicko gallows humor can be its own art-form, and Evil Dead Burn is a gratuitous circus of oft-inspired meanness. (Dog lovers, stay far far far away, and don’t say I didn’t warn you. Vociferously.) It’s just clear at this point, in the wake of Fede Álvarez’s 2013 reboot and Lee Cronin’s two-fer of Evil Dead Rise and this past spring’s The Mummy (only not an Evil Dead movie insofar as they didn’t title it Evil Dead: Egypt), that the Deadite Universe has no interest any more in gags that make you chuckle—the spectacle of eyeballs ping-ponging around Looney-Tunes-like has been put to bed in favor of a malevolence that would make even Clive Barker’s Cenobites say, “Way harsh Tai.” S’all gag now.
After an opening sequence that takes place on a little lake that should look familiar to anybody who saw the last movie (and showcasing some fishing-line and hook violence that feels torn straight from Hellraiser’s pages, speaking of the pain-loving devils) Evil Dead Burn smacks us straight to da club (where else) where Will (George Pullar) and his French wife Alice (Souheila Yacoub, who knows from French Extremity having previously co-starred in Gaspar Noe’s Climax) are celebrating the birthday of Will’s timid little bro Joseph (Wednesday actor Hunter Doohan). Also there, mainly to tell everybody to get along better than they’re currently capable of doing, is Joseph’s girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan).
Will is, not to put too fine a point on it, a real dick - thankfully we don’t have to put up with him for too long though since he’s burned up in a car accident before the film’s title card can even drop. Still in those fleeting scenes it’s not hard to see why Alice would be feeling conflicted about her newfangled widowhood, and why heading to Will’s funeral for time spent with her in-laws seems like, one would think, a torment worse than death.
Oh, such sweet naïveté. But the scales (not to mention the flesh) will fall from her eyes soon enough, don’t you worry. Vanicek mounts the tension admirably in Evil Dead Burn’s first half, even before all of the literal hell breaks out—it’s August: Osage Country with knife-play. From the moment Alice steps out of the car it’s clear there’s nothing but resentment between her and Will’s highstrung mom Susan (Tandi Wright) and sneering dad Edgar (Erroll Shand). And all of that’s only multiplied by the presence of Susan’s dementia-suffering mother Polly (Maude Davey), who thinks everyone is robbing her and whose wooden foot gets so many pointed close-ups you can practically hear the chainsaws ringing.
Vanicek has fun, in a Final Destination sort of way, with dropping clues early on as to where the coming horrors will be coming from—Edgar can’t get that damn brush-trimmer to start, and Susan has a weird fetish for putting pointy objects pointing up in the dishwasher. You might say Vanicek is more interested in laying out those breadcrumbs than he is in fleshing out the characters—although make no mistake, most of these characters will be “fleshed out” in some form before the final curtain drops.
Still Wright gives Susan a prickly presence that’s more complicated than it probably needed to be for this movie’s purposes. And Yacoub has an extremely sympathetic presence that comes in handy as this movie turns into a non-stop vicious assault on Alice physically, emotionally, and whatever the hell there is in the realm of spiritually in a world sans angels, goodness, decency. Which is to say that it might be difficult for demons to swallow ya soul in a world this malignantly soulless, but darn it they’re sure gonna give it their all-out all the same.
Vanicek’s interest in giving Alice an arc about overcoming abuse is the one thing that doesn’t feel gratuitous in Evil Dead Burn, thankfully—for all of the edgelording on display the director does seem genuine and non-exploitative in his presentation of that. It’s not just tacked on, and Yacoub sells it. Indeed the film’s knotting together of Will’s cruelty to his wife with his own father’s nastiness and his grandfather’s abandonment all glances (tentatively from beneath the gore-letting) at a throughline where generational male bullshit is intertwined with colonial impulses, of all things. We’re informed that Will’s long dead grandfather traveled the world studying Demonology, looking for dark answers in dark places he shouldn’t be looking, only to bear a curse down upon his entire line instead.
(On that note do look out for Evil Dead Wrath, in theaters next year! A 1972-set prequel to every film in the franchise where one can only assume the spread of the Deadite’s poison will be traced back to its tape-recorded beginnings. From the director of The Last Stop in Yuma County!)
Evil Dead Burn is a mean piece of work—vicious, nasty, all the adjectives you can muster, with the only real light an icy spark in the eyes of the dead and the blaze of human flesh crinkling up like barbecue. And if that’s the bang you want for your buck, so be it. It’s not exactly an imprecise reflection of the world today, where our leaders revel in their cruelty, touting genocide for its beach-front property benefits. After all the New French Extremity marched hand in crispy-fried hand with the “Torture Porn” movement here in the States, which was also birthed from another moment in time where our spread of so-called “democracy” especially felt like a disease instead. Our cancer smiling wickedly, making us all dead by dawn. Cheers!
