“Evil Dead Rise” is by no means the first film to attempt to update a beloved, older property for newer audiences — it isn’t even the first in this franchise to do so, following in the footsteps of the successful 2013 “Evil Dead” remake. Intellectual property is big in Hollywood right now, and the industry will milk anything they can for a couple of extra dollars. So we’re treated to the fifth installment of the “Evil Dead” franchise (sixth if you count the “Ash vs. Evil Dead” TV series), the first in a decade.
The series got its start in 1981 with the shocking, gory and low-budget “The Evil Dead,” which spawned two sequels in its wake over the next decade: “Evil Dead II” and “Army of Darkness.” What makes the series’s original run so special is Sam Raimi’s (“Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”) distinct filmmaking style, full of dynamic, frenetic camera movement, unique and off-putting angles and slapstick visual comedy. The series leans far more into comedy after the first film — James Cameron (“Avatar: The Way of Water”) supposedly described “Evil Dead II” as creating the genre of the “horror cartoon” — but in the last two iterations, the series has tried to shift back from the straight comedy of Raimi’s latter efforts.
Raimi stepped away from behind the camera after “Army of Darkness,” and though he has still remained involved in a producing role, successive filmmakers have tried to find a way to put their own stamp on the series. “Evil Dead Rise” writer-director Lee Cronin (“The Hole in the Ground”) wanted to take the franchise as far away from its “cabin in the woods” origins as possible. In a virtual college roundtable with The Michigan Daily, Cronin said, “If you’re going to break the mold, you’ve got to break the mold.” “Evil Dead Rise” takes the series from the isolated danger of the woods to the theoretical comfort and safety of an apartment complex in Los Angeles.
Cronin noted, “You can’t really get farther from a cabin in the woods than the top story of a high-rise building in Los Angeles.”
In order to take the series in a new direction, Cronin felt he needed to move away from the series’s typical context and characters. He does this by focusing in on a family drama as the core of the narrative, with far more depth given to characters than in previous installments. The story and characters in the series’ earlier films are almost an afterthought, as their dynamics and motivations are rushed through to get to the fun parts when all hell breaks loose.
“There are family touches in previous Evil Dead movies,” Cronin remarked, “but this is about going inside the home … This was actually a family sitting at home, essentially minding their own business, and the evil comes knocking on their doorstep,” Cronin said. This recontextualization of the series adds an emotional core that isn’t there in the original films.
By delving into the characters’ personal lives and exploring their real and relatable struggles, the audience now cares more for the characters, which drives up the tension when they are put in potentially deadly situations. It also allows the film to break free of the associations with the “Evil Dead” franchise. Certain hallmarks are still there, like the chainsaw used in the final fight and the strange camera angles — a recurring shot of the possessed Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland, “Vikings”) through the apartment peephole is both creative and intense as the viewer’s field of vision is significantly reduced while the sounds of terror and violence can still be heard. But “Evil Dead Rise” takes a different enough approach to the series that Cronin’s unique voice is able to escape the shadow of Raimi’s influence.
This is the key problem facing many new Hollywood releases: When you are given the opportunity to tackle a property with such a strong existing association with a certain artist, do you simply try to recreate their work as closely as possible? If this is the approach, you typically run into the same issues Gus Van Sant did when remaking Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” As film critic Roger Ebert said about Van Sant’s remake, “The movie is an invaluable experiment in the theory of cinema because it demonstrates that a shot-by-shot remake is pointless; genius apparently resides between or beneath the shots, or in chemistry that cannot be timed or counted.”
Recreation of already great art — adding nothing that hasn’t already been said by an existing work — is a worthless endeavor. It’s a tough balancing act to take the cards you’ve been dealt and find a way to twist them in such a way that you’re adding more elements to the property, but that does not completely alienate the built-in audience who is simply coming to your film for more of the same. Cronin has done an admirable job. That said, a viewer’s personal reaction to “Evil Dead Rise” will still be based on how far they are willing to stray from the franchise’s formula. It’s good to break formulas when they become stale or irrelevant to modern audiences, but when a formula works and it’s been 30 years since we last saw that formula used, sometimes it can be good to get back to basics.
Daily Arts Writer Mitchel Green can be reached at mitchgr@umich.edu.