Evil Dead Rise

Snapshot

Evil Dead Rise is the fifth feature in the Evil Dead franchise and the first to abandon the series' foundational cabin-in-the-woods setting, relocating Deadite possession to a decaying Los Angeles apartment block. Written and directed by the Irish filmmaker Lee Cronin, and produced under the eye of franchise architects Sam Raimi, Robert Tapert, and Bruce Campbell, the film reframes the property's core anxiety — the intimate becoming monstrous — as a story about motherhood and sisterhood rather than doomed twentysomethings on a getaway. Its central horror is a possessed mother turned against her own children, a premise the film pursues with unrelenting practical gore. Released theatrically in 2023 after originally being developed for streaming, it was widely received as a confident, brutal continuation that honored the franchise's mix of dread and dark comedy while carving out its own claustrophobic, urban identity.

Industry & production

The film sits inside a lineage carefully stewarded by Raimi's Renaissance Pictures alongside New Line Cinema. Its most consequential production fact is a change of venue: Evil Dead Rise was initially conceived as a direct-to-streaming title for Warner Bros.' HBO Max platform before the studio pivoted it to a theatrical release, a decision that reflected both confidence in the finished film and the broader industry recalibration around streaming-versus-theatrical strategy in the early 2020s. Principal photography took place in New Zealand, primarily around Auckland, which had long served as a production base for Raimi and Tapert's work (their Hercules/Xena and Spartacus television empires, and the later Ash vs Evil Dead series). Shooting an intensely American-coded story of a Los Angeles apartment building on New Zealand soundstages is itself telling about the economics of contemporary genre production, where location is a constructed effect rather than a documentary fact.

Cronin's selection as writer-director followed his 2019 debut The Hole in the Ground, an Irish folk-horror film that impressed Raimi enough to entrust him with the franchise. The producing configuration — Raimi, Tapert, and Campbell as the guarantors of continuity, Cronin as the fresh authorial voice — mirrors how the 2013 Evil Dead was handed to Fede Álvarez: the originators supervise, a younger director executes and reinvents. On exact budget and box-office figures the public record carries specific numbers I cannot responsibly reproduce from memory without risking error; what can be stated confidently is that the film was regarded within the trade as a commercial success relative to its modest cost, consistent with the franchise's long-running profile as a reliably profitable, lower-budget horror property.

Technology

Evil Dead Rise is a digitally captured film that leans heavily on practical, in-camera effects supplemented by digital finishing rather than replaced by it. The franchise's identity has always been bound to tactile, handmade horror — prosthetics, animatronics, and prodigious quantities of fake blood — and Cronin's entry continues that commitment, staging much of its carnage with practical prosthetic makeup and mechanical gags. Digital tools serve compositing, cleanup, cosmetic enhancement of practical gore, and the sweeping camera moves (including drone-style aerial work) that bracket the story. This hybrid method is now standard for the genre: the "practical effects" branding markets authenticity, while digital post quietly extends and safeguards what the on-set effects establish. The plot device that unleashes the evil is itself an old technology — vinyl records — with priests' phonograph recordings of the Book of the Dead's incantations serving as the mechanism that summons the demons, a neat conceit that trades the franchise's usual tape recorder for something older and more liturgical.

Technique

Cinematography

The cinematography is credited to Dave Garbett, a longtime collaborator within the Raimi–Tapert orbit whose work includes Ash vs Evil Dead, giving the film an insider's fluency with the franchise's visual grammar. The most striking formal choice is spatial: where earlier entries exploited the isolation of the forest, Evil Dead Rise exploits the vertical, boxed geometry of an apartment building — hallways, stairwells, a cramped elevator, locked doors. Garbett's camera favors oppressive interiors and unnerving overhead compositions, including a signature top-down framing that renders the family's home a maze seen from above, and aerial exteriors that open and close the film. The palette is dominated by dim domestic interiors punctured by shocks of red, and the film repeatedly uses the architecture of the building — the peephole, the corridor, the flooded elevator — as framing devices that convert familiar living space into a trap.

Editing

Cut by Bryan Shaw, the film is structured around a prologue-and-payoff frame: a cold open at a lakeside setting (a nod to the franchise's woods origins) that is later revealed to be the aftermath, so the main body of the film plays as flashback to the night before. Within scenes, the editing modulates between slow-burn dread — long, quiet build-ups as possession spreads — and the franchise-mandatory bursts of frenetic violence. The rhythm honors Raimi's model without imitating his kinetic camera style directly; Cronin's film is more patient in its stalking passages and then abrupt in its shocks.

Mise-en-scène / staging

The production design's central invention is the apartment itself and the wider building, a condemned, earthquake-damaged block whose decay is legible in every frame. An early tremor cracks open a hidden bank vault beneath the parking garage, from which the children retrieve the records and the Book of the Dead — a literalization of buried, foundational evil rising up through the domestic structure (the "Rise" of the title working on multiple registers). Staging concentrates the action in and around one family unit, using locked doors, thresholds, and the peephole to organize suspense. Everyday domestic objects are weaponized in the franchise tradition — most infamously a cheese grater — collapsing the boundary between kitchen and slaughterhouse.

Sound

The score is by Stephen McKeon, Cronin's composer from The Hole in the Ground, whose music trades in dissonance and dread rather than melodic reassurance. Sound design is crucial to the possession conceit: the crackle and warp of the vinyl recordings, the distorted vocalizations of the possessed (the guttural, layered Deadite voice that has been a franchise signature since 1981), and the tactile squelch of the practical gore all do heavy narrative work. The demonic voice — taunting, obscene, mimicking the mother's affection — is arguably the film's most disturbing sonic element.

Performance

The film rests on two central performances. Alyssa Sutherland plays Ellie, the single mother whose possession transforms maternal warmth into predatory menace; her turn is the film's engine, requiring a shift from exhausted tenderness to grotesque, sing-song malevolence. Lily Sullivan plays Beth, the estranged, itinerant sister (a guitar tech facing an unplanned pregnancy) who is thrust into a surrogate-mother role as she fights to protect her nieces and nephew. The child and adolescent performers carry significant dramatic weight, since the film's horror depends on our belief in this family as a family before it is torn apart. Sutherland's performance in particular drew critical attention as one of the more memorable Deadite embodiments in the series.

Narrative & dramatic mode

Structurally the film is a survival-horror siege compressed into a single night and a single dwelling, framed by a prologue that discloses the outcome in advance and thereby loads the main narrative with dread. Its dramatic mode fuses domestic melodrama with body horror: the first act invests in a recognizable family under strain — a separation, money worries, a pregnancy, sisterly estrangement — precisely so the possession can desecrate those bonds. The register oscillates between genuine emotional stakes and grand-guignol excess, with streaks of the gallows humor the franchise is known for, though Cronin pitches the comedy far lower than Raimi's slapstick Evil Dead II. The through-line is a survival narrative in which the protective adult (Beth) must become the mother she is afraid to be.

Genre & cycle

Evil Dead Rise belongs to the possession/demonic-horror tradition and to the specific Evil Dead cycle inaugurated by Raimi in 1981. Within that cycle it is a reinvention rather than a sequel or reboot: it neither continues Ash Williams' arc nor retells the 2013 remake, but transplants the core mythology (the Book of the Dead, the Deadites, the ritual of unwitting summoning) into a new milieu. Its relocation to an apartment building consciously breaks the "cabin in the woods" convention that the original films helped codify, aligning it instead with urban-siege horror. It also participates in the 2010s–2020s wave of "elevated" or thematically-driven horror crossed with unabashed extremity, and in the broader cycle of legacy-horror-franchise revivals that studios pursued in the period.

Authorship & method

The authorship is genuinely dual. Cronin is the film's writer-director and creative author, bringing from The Hole in the Ground a preoccupation with maternal anxiety and the family unit under supernatural threat — themes that make him an unusually apt custodian for this particular story. His key collaborators reinforce a coherent method: cinematographer Dave Garbett supplies franchise-literate camerawork; composer Stephen McKeon carries over his working relationship with Cronin; editor Bryan Shaw shapes the prologue-frame structure and the tonal swings. Above them all sit Raimi, Tapert, and Campbell as producers, functioning as guarantors of tone and mythology rather than hands-on directors. This is franchise authorship as supervised delegation — the same arrangement that produced Álvarez's 2013 film — in which a distinctive newer voice is allowed genuine creative latitude within firmly maintained brand parameters. The practical-effects-first ethos is itself an authorial signature inherited from Raimi's low-budget origins.

Movement / national cinema

The film is not easily assigned to a single national cinema, which is itself characteristic of contemporary genre production. It is an American studio franchise property, directed by an Irish filmmaker, photographed by a New Zealand-based cinematographer, and shot in New Zealand. Cronin's presence links it, at least in authorial temperament, to the strong recent current of Irish and British Isles horror preoccupied with folklore, family, and the uncanny domestic — the milieu of his own debut. But Evil Dead Rise is not a folk-horror film; it is a transnational commercial production whose "American" texture is engineered rather than native. The more meaningful lineage is industrial: the Auckland-based Raimi–Tapert production infrastructure that has for decades manufactured American genre entertainment offshore.

Era / period

Made and released in the early 2020s, the film bears the marks of its moment in ways beyond its content. Its journey from an intended HBO Max streaming release to a theatrical bow is a direct artifact of the post-pandemic industry's unsettled relationship between streaming and cinemas. Aesthetically it reflects a period in which horror had reclaimed cultural and commercial prestige, and in which studios aggressively revived dormant genre franchises for a new generation. Its emphasis on practical effects also reads as a period signature — a deliberate, marketable rejoinder to an era of digitally-dominated spectacle, positioning tactile gore as a mark of authenticity.

Themes

The film's dominant theme is motherhood and its corruption. By making the possessed figure a mother and her victims her own children (and their protective aunt), Cronin turns the franchise's abstract dread of contamination into something specifically familial and gendered: the person meant to nurture becomes the thing that hunts. Adjacent themes include sisterhood and estrangement (Beth and Ellie's fractured relationship, and Beth's reluctant assumption of a maternal role), the fear of impending parenthood (Beth's pregnancy), and the fragility of the home as sanctuary. The apartment building — condemned, cracked open by a quake to release a buried evil — functions as a sustained metaphor: the domestic structure is unsound at its foundations, and what was buried beneath the family literally rises to devour it. The Deadite's cruelest weapon is mimicry of maternal love, which makes the film's horror as much psychological as visceral.

Reception, canon & influence

Critically, Evil Dead Rise was received as one of the stronger entries in the franchise's modern phase, with particular praise for its practical gore, its claustrophobic apartment setting, and Alyssa Sutherland's performance; reviewers frequently framed it as a worthy, distinctive continuation rather than a redundant retread. (I am characterizing the consensus rather than citing specific figures, which I will not fabricate.)

Its influences flow backward through a clear genealogy. Most directly it draws on Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981) and Evil Dead II (1987) and their mythology of the Book of the Dead and Deadite possession, and on Álvarez's harder-edged 2013 remake, which re-established the franchise as a vehicle for serious, extreme horror stripped of Ash's comedy. Beyond the franchise, its single-night, single-location siege structure and its theme of the possessed intimate connect it to the wider possession-horror tradition and to urban-confinement horror. Cronin's own The Hole in the Ground is a clear authorial antecedent for its maternal preoccupations.

Its forward legacy is still consolidating given its recency, but two things can be said with confidence. First, it demonstrated that the Evil Dead property could thrive without Ash Williams and without the woods, expanding the franchise's conceptual range and keeping it commercially viable as an ongoing concern — a further Evil Dead film from a different filmmaker was subsequently set in motion under the same producers. Second, it reinforced a broader industry lesson that supervised-auteur revivals of horror IP, built on practical effects and a strong thematic hook, remain a durable model. As the most recent installment at the time of writing, its full influence on the genre and the franchise remains to be seen, and I flag that the historical record on its downstream impact is necessarily thin.