It’s easier to compare Evil Dead Burn against the magic of the original Sam Raimi vehicles in 2026, in part because Sam Raimi is back in the director chair and relased Send Help only six months ago. It’s unfortunate for Sebastien Vanicek that audiences were reminded of the earnestness, willingness to look foolish, and hilarity that made the franchise stand apart to begin with. It’s easy to make a passable horror film, it’s incredibly difficult to make a great one. The Evil Dead franchise still has legs today because those first three entries were great.

Evil Dead Burn leans away from the camp and the plucky earnestness of a young Bruce Campbell foolishly attempting to stem a Jetstream of blood from pouring out of the walls. Instead it tilts towards the modern horror maneuver of being a tale about grappling with trauma. The film opens with the death of Will, a bar owner who gets into a fight with his wife Alice (Souheila Yacoub) and promptly crashes his car into a Deadite (zombie demon essentially, for those unfamiliar with the franchise). He is naturally, burned to death and promptly infected with the Deadite curse. Alice then must travel to her in-law’s home, and attend a tense funeral with her deceased husband’s parents and younger brother in which the expected sequence of events of any Evil Dead begin taking place. That in everyone is turned into cruel murderous psychopathic Deadites who are bent on the torture and death of every living thing in the area.

The tone of Burn leans away even from other recent entries into the franchise. While Evil Dead (2013) was a bloodier, more violently frightening remake, and Evil Dead Rise threw a few children into the mix of Deadite fun, Evil Dead Burn steeps itself French Extremity Horror by never slowing down once the gore and guts begin being spilled. There is something to be said for the level of torture in some horror films, but here it often winds up feeling cruel for the sake of cruelty. Alice is being punished, seemingly, for being unable to leave an abusive relationship. And the people doing it are ones that constantly looked away from her husband’s It feels more like a script that was developed whole cloth and then had the Evil Dead brand hastily stamped onto it.

Evil Dead Burn feels like it wants to both celebrate and punish its female protagonist. It’s hard to look at it and feel like Director Vanicek is using acts of domestic violence from a place of desperation. The one thing that maybe feels true is the way the family ignores the crimes that Will did when he was living. The way these secrets have eaten at this family that he left behind, and now that he’s gone the idea that they may come out is the real rot at the heart of the household. But it’s lazily highlighted, and quickly discarded for further gruesome torture of our heroine.

One other problem with Burn, is that it is tremendously ugly to look at. The grey filter that’s thrown over the entire movie, much of the camera work feels amateurish, even the focus can’t seem to make up its mind. One has to assume these decisions were made on purpose to lend a more disturbing feel to the movie, but it’s hard to be afraid of a blurry blob standing at the end of the driveway, or a shaky cam cut away from a Deadite attack. There’s a considerable amount more CGI in this feature than in previous entries, and one particularly galling moment is a couple of Deadites scrambling on the roof of the house in the dark. CGI in poorly lit spaces usually looks better, but one cannot say the same about this sequence.

One thing that some newer horror director’s are discovering is that horror does not have to be exclusively twisted torture scare tactics. Directors like Zach Cregger, Curry Barker, and Jordan Peele, are leaning into what the original Evil Dead director discovered nearly four decades ago. Horror can be silly at times, and when you take a moment to break that tension, it makes the scares all the better. The throttling back and forth from terror to delight is what makes many genre film stand apart. Eventually we’ll get the folks that make Evil Dead films on back on track.

2/5