Culture

Now Playing: ‘Evil Dead Burns’ doesn’t catch fire

By: Gordon Briggs
Posted on: Wednesday, July 22, 2026

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It’s one of my favorite scenes from the original Evil Dead trilogy. In Evil Dead 2, a character’s mother has been turned into a bloodthirsty zombie and locked in the basement. Attempting to free itself from captivity, the monster temporarily reverts to human appearance, taking the form and voice of the character’s mother, and begins to sing her daughter a lullaby. It’s a twisted scene that unnerves us not with its blood and gore, but with its psychological dilemma. How can you kill something that looks like someone you love?

I wish there were more moments like that in the new Evil Dead movie. Moments that played off our more primal fears and fewer moments that were trying to make us queasy with graphic violence that was not only tedious, but just plain mean.

In a sequel to the previous film, Evil Dead Rise, after the loss of her husband, a grieving woman seeks solace with her in-laws at their secluded family home. However, it soon becomes a reunion from hell as the Book of the Dead unleashes demonic forces that transform them into Deadites one by one. Where the previous Sam Raimi films went for a more humorous approach, this sequel isn’t really interested in making us laugh. It ditches the slapstick, tongue-in-cheek humor of The Evil Dead or Army of Darkness eras, opting instead for a grim, mean-spirited, and emotionally grueling tone. It’s almost like the filmmakers want to punish the audience.

The film amplifies the toxic family dynamics and trauma into relentless, visceral violence. That choice, to scale back the humor and emphasize family trauma, produces some mixed results. We don’t really get to know who this family is before the film proceeds to show us them sadistically torturing and murdering each other one by one. Another frustrating aspect is how the movie’s violence does not build. For instance, the film starts with a brutal decapitation and ripping of a body in half, only to be followed by another scene where we watch someone else burn alive in a vehicle, and that’s all in just the first five minutes of the film. How can we be shocked at what comes later when the film starts in such an over-the-top, brutal fashion?

This is another movie that tries to build its horror around the all-popular buzzword of “trauma”, but there are literally dozens of other recent better horror films that are already built around dysfunctional family dynamics. Bring Her Back, Hokum, and Hereditary, to name a few.

The Price family is constructed out of very unoriginal, paper-thin horror archetypes (the aggressive father, the struggling writer brother, and the uptight mother). Evil Dead Burns seems largely uninterested in exploring in depth the actual psychological or emotional reality of Alice’s trauma. There is very little nuance that feels specific to this family. Instead, the screenplay uses domestic abuse for shallow shock value. Because the characters are aggressively hostile and unlikable even before the Deadite possessions begin, their ultimate fates carry very little emotional weight or tension. ★ ★ 1/2