By Steve Dinneen
More than any other genre, horror creators tend to return to the blood-filled trough, picking at the carcasses of movies past and re-hashing them for new audiences. It’s the reason we’ve seen 13 Halloweens, 12 Friday the 13ths and nine A Nightmare On Elm Streets – but as each of these franchises proves, striking a balance between paying homage and creating something new can be frightfully difficult.
There are no such quandaries for The Evil Dead – the only stipulations here is that there are dead, and that they are evil. Director Lee Cronin’s blistering Evil Dead Rise ticks both boxes with aplomb.
It begins with a flash forward to a lake vista straight out of Friday 13th: some teens are hanging out, as they tend to in these films, when a terrible presence spoils the absolute hell out of their afternoon. Flash back 24 hours and we’re in a dilapidated apartment block during a storm. Single mum Ellie and her three kids are joined by auntie Beth, who is back from a stint on the road as a guitar technician and is definitely, definitely not a groupie.
There’s an earthquake, a tomb is revealed, a sinister book is stolen – you know the drill. Ellie ends up as the terrifying vessel for the titular evil dead and begins terrorising her family and the remaining tenants in the now-definitely-haunted building.
It’s a brilliant meeting of schlocky creature horror and modern CGI, a hilariously grotesque riff on the franchise’s B-movie origins. Alyssa Sutherland is wonderful as the possessed matriarch of the piece, putting in a performance that’s at once genuinely frightening and joyously camp.
Lily Sullivan’s Beth becomes the de facto heroine, transforming admirably from strung-out waster to chainsaw-wielding maniac – there’s a scene late on in which, either through canny acting or subtle CGI, she seems to literally become Bruce Campbell’s iconic demon-slayer Ash from the original movies.
Cronin showed he’s capable of slow-burn scares with his excellent feature debut The Hole in the Ground and he creates real tension in this claustrophobic little apartment block. But it’s the lavish and extravagant body horror that will linger longest in the memory, whether someone vomiting black worms or full-on dismemberment.
Horror references abound, from the relatively subtle (Ellie clambering the walls behind Beth in a shot borrowed from Hereditary) to the frankly outrageous (recreating the most famous scene from one of the best horror movies ever made).
Evil Dead Rise is a wonderfully pure reboot, capturing the spark that made the franchise such a hit and jettisoning everything else. It’s bloody brilliant.
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