Evil Dead Burn sequel is a sadistic endurance test

Director Sébastien Vaniček brings fresh flavour to a 45-year-old horror franchise with Evil Dead Burn. His cuisine of choice? The tongue-tingling taste of French Extreme Cinema.

Lee Cronin, who departed the franchise after resurrecting it with 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, leaves Vaniček with some big shoes to fill – but if anyone knows how to get under the skin, it’s the director of icky killer spider film Infested.

Taking inspiration from Gallic nasties Martyrs, Frontier(s)and Inside, Vaniček ups the series’ trademark violence to an all-new level of ferocity, making this the most harrowing Evil Dead yet.

Yes, even more so than the one with the cheese grater.

Picking up where the previous film left off, this sequel finds another family unit beset by gnashing, self-brutalising Deadites. In the violence it unleashes, though, it makes Ellie and her demon-possessed children look like the Waltons.

This lot? They’re an awful bunch, long before the screaming starts.

Suffering Evil Dead’s latest torrent of terror is Frenchwoman Alice (Souheila Yacoub), who arrives at her American in-laws’ holiday home to mourn the death of her hot-tempered husband. Other people’s families and Deadites are never an easy prospect at the best of times. When the twain collide? So are born the in-laws from Hell.

Alice’s torture begins well before the carnage does, in the passive-aggressive barbs from resentful mother-in-law Susan (Tandi Wright) and the, uh, aggression-aggression of father-in-law Edgar (Erroll Shand).

Simpering brother-in-law Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and his sympathetic girlfriend (Luciane Buchanan) attempt to keep the peace, but the odds are stacked against Alice in an environment where she’s made to feel increasingly unwelcome and piled upon.

It’s almost a relief when the Deadites inevitably rear their ugly Head-ites, bringing with them a more straightforward form of violence.

If you thought Evil Dead Rise went hard, then Burn is doubly punishing. From a cremation spoiled by the din of nearby construction work to an agonising dinner sequence, everything is precisely calibrated for maximum discomfort and upset.

This extends to the shocking gore work, which eschews the usual chainsaws and boomsticks for a more down-and-dirty variety of Deadite destruction – if it’s a blunt or bladed object and it’s in the film, you can bet you’ll see someone get clattered around (or inside) the head with it.

It’s not just physical violence, though, bringing to the table a more pernicious undercurrent of psychological anguish that previous films have ignored.

In tapping into this all-too-real trauma, Evil Dead Burn finds an emotional resonance that previous films in the series may have neglected.

This is the first film in the series which directly tackles themes of trauma and grief – buzzwords which have plagued the horror genre over the past two decades, from The Babadook to David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy.

Nobody’s going gently into the good night here, though. And there’s precious little catharsis to be found in Alice’s fight against the abusers in her life.

Gone is the bombastic hero’s journey of Evil Dead 2’s Ash, or the empowerment of Rise’s Beth. There’s just more pain – a cycle which only results in further trauma and more hurt, no matter Alice’s victories.

It doesn’t make for easy viewing, and Vaniček somehow manages to up the ante in what was already one of horror cinema’s most consistently gruesome franchises.

Yacoub handles this onslaught of abuse like a champ, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Jane Levy, Alyssa Sutherland and the mighty Bruce Campbell as another great Evil Dead survivor.

Still, for all its savagery, the series hasn’t lost its funnybone entirely, and there’s plenty of humour waiting in the gallows… or on granny’s stairlift.

Those who got a kick out of the twisted family dynamics of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy should find something similar to ‘enjoy’ here, and Vaniček does great work in finding moments of comic absurdity within his house of horrors.

It’s a fusion of the old and new, paying tribute to what has come before without feeling beholden to it, nor overshadowed by the series’ lore.

Between rounds of bloodshed, Vaniček also finds room to set up the film’s 2028 prequel, Evil Dead Wrath, which will presumably explore the shadowy group of scholars hinted at in the family attic.

This heavy-handed worldbuilding is one of the film’s few missteps, resulting in some awkward exposition dumps that it never really needed in the first place.

So too, the ambitious finale, which attempts to build a sense of scale previously seen in Rise and the 2013 remake, but is let down by an unconvincing visual effect.

These are rare misfires in an otherwise immaculately crafted horror sequel, and not enough to spoil the mood as painstakingly built by Vaniček and co-writer Florent Bernard.

Take the relief where you can – a moment’s breathing room in a film which otherwise holds its audience with an iron claw to the throat.

That The Evil Dead still has the power to shock and awe is particularly impressive for Burn being the sixth film in the series.

Forty-five years later, and Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and Bruce Campbell’s creation is still finding new ways to terrorise its audience, constantly reinventing and recontextualising itself with every outing.

It’s yet to put a foot wrong, and Burn is the latest successful entry in what might just be horror cinema’s most consistent franchise.

The colourful shenanigans of Ashley Williams have never felt so far in the past (or future, depending on what the time-travelling hero is up to now) but The Evil Dead has never lost sight of its grubby roots.

A disturbing video nasty filtered through the lens of ’00s French Extremism, this is the least groovy Evil Dead film ever made… and all the groovier for it.