970x125
Evil Dead Burn blazed into theaters on July 10, 2026.
Evil Dead Burn brings the blood and guts … but forgets the heart
The biggest problem with Evil Dead Burn is that it isn’t really an Evil Dead movie. It’s more like a combination of Demons and August Osage County, but if a studio has a preexisting, big name intellectual property in their assets, they might as well use them.
Director Sebastien Vanicek is obviously more influenced by turn of the millennium French bloodbaths like Martyrs and High Tension than he is Sam Raimi. Which makes sense, since Vanicek is a French filmmaker and all. Evil Dead Burn is only his second feature film (following 2023’s Infested) and his take on the Deadite formula is … unorthodox, to say the least.
Now, I’ll go on the record stating that I was not a fan of the 2013 Evil Dead remake/reboot. And frankly, I can’t even remember all that much about Evil Dead Rise (and it only came out a few years ago.) Spiritually, Evil Dead Burn is much, MUCH closer in tone to those non-Raimi-directed Evil Dead movies than the O.G trilogy. And that’s going to be your singular bellwether for the subjective quality of this movie. If you liked the last two Evil Dead theatrical releases, you’ll probably like this one. But if you liked The Evil Dead movies starring Bruce Campbell? Yeah, this may not be your jam at all.
It’s a movie that tries to tell a family drama within the mythos of The Evil Dead. But the film makes a gargantuan misstep by making virtually every character in the movie — even the heroine! — fairly unlikable, if not flat-out detestable. There’s nobody to root for, nobody to cheer for, nobody you hope escapes from all of the carnage. And when you’re in an all out, paint the walls red bloodbath extravaganza, the lack of any relatable and/or sympathetic characters really dooms the whole thing tonally. There’s nobody that really connects as a self-insert figure, the character you’re supposed to vicariously experience the movie through. And when you simply don’t care if the characters get disemboweled or not, it makes the ensuing carnage little more than seasonal haunted house attraction kitsch. It’s just special effects, and the viewer is safely distant from it all.
Evil Dead Burn is a bloody movie but it’s not really a visceral one. You don’t feel the terror or the pain or the paranoia of its characters; indeed, the only truly human emotion this movie makes you feel is exhausted. By the time it was over, I felt like I had just been on a two-hour tour of a slaughter house. And even exposed intestines and spinal impalements start to feel old after a while.
The movie begins with two cannon fodder characters getting brutally eviscerated in a lake (uh, spoiler, I guess?) It does a pretty good job of establishing the tempo for the rest of the movie; people are introduced, they get boiled alive and have their skin yanked out by sentient fish hooks and then it’s time to briskly skedaddle on over to the next set of soon-to-be lunch meat.
Souheila Yacoub, who you might remember from Gaspar Noe’s Climax (2018), plays our obvious final girl Alice. I don’t want to say it’s an uninspired performance, but it’s obviously not an inspired one, either. She just kinda goes through the motions, watching all of her family members slowly turn into bloodthirsty ghouls and just champing at the bit to do ‘em all in with various forms of power tools. The filmmakers may have been going for some sort of Tolstoyian “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” analogue here, but it doesn’t land at all. The problem with making a family drama is that, for the drama to mean something, we kinda have to care about the family. Instead, you KNOW just about everybody in that house is dead meat and the only real question you want to ask is “how long until these people have to eat the business end of a chainsaw?”
The gore quotient is pretty much the reason to see the movie and I’m sure the filmmakers and studio alike recognized that pretty early on. There’s no way to work around it, Evil Dead Burn is a straight up gore-a-thon, with plenty of stabbings, immolations, decapitations and people getting their throats poked out with those little pointy things on the end of head rests. If it’s not the bloodiest mainstream, wide-release theatrical movie we get in 2026, it must mean Dead Alive is getting an anniversary re-release or something.
But then again, grossness can only carry a film so far. That’s why total bloodbaths like The Sadness, The Green Inferno or The Night Comes For Us are all but forgotten while drier movies like From Beyond, The Changeling and The Reflecting Skin are all hailed as classics today. Pretty much all of the carnage in Evil Dead Burn is stuff we’ve seen before, in some capacity. Sorry, but it’s the year 2026 and watching two characters share a bloody French kiss just isn’t that shocking anymore. Amazingly enough, Evil Dead Burn marks the SECOND major horror movie of 2026 to involve a scene in which very gross things are done to an elderly woman’s dentures; I guess Lee Cronin really wasn’t joking about The Mummy taking place in the Evil Dead universe after all. Oh, and one final piece of advice for contemporary horror directors: if you’re going to show a character drinking hot candle wax, remember, it’s just going to make audiences think of that one episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes to the chili cook-off.
Another issue with Evil Dead Burn? The cinematography. It’s a super dark movie, and I don’t mean that thematically, I mean it literally. It’s kinda hard to make out what’s supposed to be happening onscreen sometimes and don’t even get me started on how shoddy the CGI in the third act looks. Without spoiling the movie, let’s just say some of the imagery looks like something taken out of the first Resident Evil game on the Playstation1. It’s not convincing at all, and kinda embarrassing at certain points.
Yes, Raimi’s Evil Dead movies were bloody, but the gore was never without an element of camp. The gruesome violence in those films actually felt consequential and you had a central character you wanted to see triumph over the forces of evil. The movies were often brutal, but they never felt cruel or nihilistic or abjectly hopeless. There was always some humor, some levity, some sense of optimism. Evil Dead Burn, however, is like watching a barrel of roadkill get set on fire. There’s some morbid fascination at first, but that putrid smell is sure to get to you sooner or later.
Some people might enjoy this movie. And those people probably have a family member or an ex-spouse they want to kill in real life, for whatever reason. But I’m afraid there’s not much genuine fun or terror to be found in Evil Dead Burn. It’s got all the guts and gore, but it’s missing the one thing that made Raimi’s movies so legendary — the heart.
GIVE IT A WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Evil Dead (2013), Evil Dead Rise (2023), dishwasher-related accidents
DIRECTOR: Sebastian Vanicek
STARRING: Souheila Yacoub, Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan
WRITER(S): Sebastian Vanicek and Florent Bernard
STUDIO: New Line Cinema/Screen Gems/Ghost House Pictures
DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Brothers
RUNTIME: 109 minutes
LANGUAGE: English
RELEASE DATE: July 10, 2026
