Evil Dead Burn Blazes Into Action with New Teaser, Release Date
The sixth movie in the Evil Dead series sets fire to theaters on July 10.
With only five films released over the course of 45 years, the Evil Dead series is one of the few horror franchises that can claim that it’s never had a bad installment ... yet. The closest the series has come to a critical miss was in 2013 with the dark, gritty reboot Evil Dead, directed by Fede Alvarez; that film scored an indifferent 64 percent with critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, although 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, directed by Lee Cronin (you know, of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy?), brought both back into the fold with a respectable 85 percent/75 percent split.
Compared to the decade-long hiatus between the last two Evil Dead movies, the three years that have passed between Evil Dead Rise and the upcoming sixth installment in the (film — Don’t forget Ash Vs. Evil Dead) series, Evil Dead Burn, seems like nothing. Carrying on another tradition of giving up-and-coming horror filmmakers a boost, French director Sébastien Vaniček takes over for this newest film after his creepy-crawly debut feature Infested in 2023. That film took place in the cramped confines of a high-rise apartment block in suburban Paris, and was packed full of the inventive camerawork and high-intensity horror action that have characterized the latter-day Evil Dead movies.
The first teaser for Evil Dead Burn has a similar sense of urgency, following a woman (Swiss actress Souheila Yacoub) in a single, unbroken take as she wakes up with a head injury in a dark, dusty house, then crawls across the floor of a living room, squirming and ducking as Deadite mayhem unfolds all around her.
Like Infested, the teaser seems to promise a relentless, high-intensity viewing experience — the soundtrack is made up mostly of screaming and crashing, with Yacoub’s panicked gasping underneath — utilizing the bigger budget that comes with an American studio picture. The stunt work is especially impressive, as characters pop into and out of the frame before being snatched up and dragged away (or thrown through pieces of furniture) by hungry Deadites. The only real concern here is that the cinematography is very dark, making it difficult to see what’s happening on all but the best calibrated screens.
Warner Bros. certainly seems to have faith in Evil Dead Burn, moving it up two weeks from its original release date on July 24 to a new date of July 10. This puts the R-rated horror movie up against Disney’s live-action Moana remake in theaters, although the overlap there should be minimal.
Here’s the official synopsis:
“EVIL DEAD BURN unleashes the franchise’s most savage and terrifying ride to date, blazing onto big screens with an all-new chapter of carnage and demonic mayhem. After the loss of her husband, a woman seeks solace with her in-laws in their secluded family home. As one by one they are transformed into Deadites—turning the gathering into a family reunion from hell—she comes to discover that the vows she took in life…live on even in death.”
