When I started this series, I talked about the unending smugness that Evil Dead fans enjoy. The series is now forty years old and still maintains an absolutely insane level of quality. How has this happened? How have Ash, Mia, and now poor auntie Beth’s torture at the hands (no, actually, don’t mention hands in front of this group) of the Deadites remained so watchable when the likes of Halloween, The Exorcist, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchises have floundered in the same time frame? Evil Dead Rise provides the answers.
When you look at the trajectory of the franchise, the Evil Dead movies have played out in the exact opposite way to their contemporaries. Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, have all gone down a similar creative route. Each franchise starts with an absolute banger, an iconic horror masterpiece that usually stands as the scariest of each series. From then on, each property becomes sillier and sillier: Freddy becomes a wise-cracking comedic demon, Michael’s lore becomes as silly as each successive mask, and Jason goes to fucking space! Each franchise also suffers from the diminishing returns of seemingly endless sequels, reboots, and requels.
The Evil Dead franchise goes completely the other way. It starts off both silly and scary, but also builds its story around a hero (a loose description of Ash) as well as the monsters he fights. Ash’s trilogy is high horror farce that balances its broader comic moments with brilliant sequences of terror. Unlike the other franchises, the best way forward for Evil Dead was to get more serious. The remake is a masterpiece, but it’s hardly a laugh a minute, and Evil Dead Rise doubles down on this.
Another thing the franchise has in its favour is its choice of directors. Sam Raimi, Fede Alvarez, and now Lee Cronin (whose debut, The Hole on the Ground, is a huge favourite of ours) have put their own spin on these stories while including demons, lots of blood, and a chainsaw. Evil Dead Rise keeps things fresh through simple yet clever choices. Staging the action in an apartment block brings its own set piece challenges, but the real stroke of genius is the characters.
Let’s face it, as Evil Dead fans, we are supposed to enjoy two things: Bruce Campbell getting the shit kicked out of him, and teenagers dying after being stupid enough to not only read the evil book, but listen to the audiobook as well. The genius of Evil Dead Rise is that I actually care about these characters. These aren’t dumb jocks, or obvious cannon fodder, it’s a family and it’s really fucking unfair. Cronin merges Evil Dead with a version of The Shining where the mother is the one to go mad, and just basks in the mayhem of it all.
Forty years, four movies, and an awesome TV show and The Evil Dead is still going strong. Why? Because it did its own thing, ignored the trends of horror and appears every decade or so to remind you that its still the best franchise in all of horror. Just don’t let David Gordon Green get his hands on it.
If you enjoyed this and want to see more stuff like it, please consider supporting us on Ko-Fi.
By Kevin Boyle
(header image via IMDB)
No But Listen 