Evil Dead Burn (2026) New Line/Horror RT: 110 minutes Rated R (strong bloody horror violence and gore, language) Director: Sebastien Vanicek Screenplay: Sebastien Vanicek and Florent Bernard Music: Double Danger Cinematography: Philip Lozano Release date: July 10, 2026 (US) Cast: Souheila Yacoub, Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan, Erroll Shand, Maude Davey, George Pullar, Tapiwa Soropa, Keanu Karim, Victory Ndukwe, Greta Van Den Brink.
Rating: ***
How you feel about Evil Dead Burn depends on whether or not you saw Sam Raimi’s original trilogy. If you haven’t, you’ll like it more than those who have. I expect a lot of young people in attendance have only seen the more recent installments, Evil Dead (2013) and Evil Dead Rise (2023). The newer movies are fine, but it’s impossible to top the Raimi ones. They’re in a class of their own. That being said, I did like Evil Dead Burn. That is to say, I liked it as long as I didn’t think about the OGs.
Before I proceed, let me clear a little something up. Evil Dead Burn is being described as a “standalone sequel”. It is to a certain degree. The main story has no connection to the previous films. However, the opening scene does. A couple of guys are out fishing on a familiar lake when they encounter the Deadite Jessica (Brink) from Rise. She proceeds to kill them before heading to a nearby road to wait for somebody.
The person Jessica is looking for turns out to be Will (Pullar, It Only Takes a Night), an aggressive type who drunkenly leaves the restaurant he owns with his French wife Alice (Yacoub, Climax) after a heated argument at his younger brother Joseph’s (Doohan, Wednesday) birthday celebration. He literally runs into Jessica and is killed. Or so it seems.
Alice shows up for her late hubby’s cremation service where she’s not warmly received by her in-laws. His parents Susan (Wright, Pearl) and Edgar (Shand, Chief of War) blame her for the crash that killed him. The only problem is that Will isn’t exactly dead. He’s a Deadite now and he passes it along to his dad when he stops by the cremation room to say a final private goodbye. They all go back to the family cabin where Edgar starts to shows signs of possession. He starts by killing the family dog and it only gets worse from there.
So why did Jessica go after Will specifically? It has to do with Joseph, a writer working on a book about his late grandfather and his involvement with a group called The Circle of Wise Men. He finds among his possession a dagger that the Deadites want. It’s the only thing that can kill them. They will stop at nothing to get it. Also, as if things weren’t bad enough, Alice finds the Necronomicon and reads from it which only stirs things up more.
Remember when I said I enjoyed Evil Dead Burn as long as I didn’t think of the Raimi ones? Well, director Sebastien Vanicek (Infested) makes it kind of hard not to. The French filmmaker keeps repeating the same visual beats, especially the wild camerawork. What once felt fresh and exciting now feels commonplace. I know the rapidly moving through the woods shots are trademarks of the series, but it isn’t as thrilling as it was 40 years ago. Still, that’s not Vanicek’s biggest slip-up. Where’s the humor? Raimi has a gift for injecting comedy into bloody horror. He did it brilliantly with Evil Dead 2 (1987). This one, while still extremely gory, is decidedly grim. It’s weighed down by its more serious themes- i.e. spousal abuse, enabling parents and toxic family dynamics. Then there’s the killing of the dog. That just bummed me out.
On the upside, Evil Dead Burn tells a pretty good story. If taken on its own terms, it’s not bad. While it contains serious themes, it’s not actually defined by them. It’s not meant to be a metaphor like last month’s Leviticus. It’s just a bloody horror film about a heroine fighting the undead in a bloody battle for survival. The gore is plentiful which strikes me as interesting. This one managed an R rating while the makers of Obsession were forced to trim a few seconds of one scene to avoid an NC-17. The older I get, the less I understand the MPA ratings board. ANYWAY, Evil Dead Burn is the kind of balls-out horror flick we don’t see a lot of these days.
One thing I can say in Vanicek’s favor is that he relies more on old school practical effects than CGI. It has a few digital enhancements here and there, but it’s mostly the work of actual makeup artists. Evil Dead Burn takes an extreme approach to the violence and gore. Some call it “new school French extremity” much like High Tension (2003) and Martyrs (2008). Well, I like it. It’s brutal, bloody and relentless.
The acting is pretty decent. By that, I mean the actors deliver the performances called for by the material. The standout is lead actress Yacoub. She’s pretty bad ass and she knows her way around a power tool. Maude Davey (The Newsreader) brings a little levity as the dementia-suffering grandmother who thinks her granddaughter-in-law is a thief. She has a painful encounter with a stair lift. Shand is sufficiently hateful as the dog-killing dad. Wright, just like her character in Pearl, takes bad mom to a new level. She starts out passive-aggressive and graduates to aggressive.
Evil Dead Burn is damn good for a midsummer horror film not meant to be taken seriously if it takes itself that way at times. It struggles with tone, but ultimately emerges as a solid Friday or Saturday night scary movie. It still doesn’t have anything on the Sam Raimi ones. Be sure to stick around for a mid-credits scene and an end credits one. The latter is totally worth it. 
