Evil Dead Burn (2026)

Alice’s (Souheila Yacoub) marriage to abusive Will (George Pullar) ends rather abruptly when he dies in a drunk driving accident. Well, actually, it’s more a drunk driving deadite accident, for his family owns an object that is apparently very unhealthy for the things, and they’re drawn to destroy it.

Following the death, and Will’s incineration, Alice is supposed to spend some time with her husband’s family somewhere out in the sticks. This would have been a rather unpleasant experience in any case, given the amount of dysfunction in the family and their barely checked aggressions towards Alice, but once the first of these mostly horrible people get possessed, our protagonist finds herself in a maelstrom of cruelty and bloody violence even worse than the relationship that got her there.

Sébastien Vanicek’s entry into the Evil Dead universe has been rather divisive apparently. To a degree, I am sympathetic if a viewer doesn’t want to inflict a film on themselves that’s quite as effective at causing stress, and quite as brutally getting into inter-familial trauma and cruelty as this one does. On the other hand, isn’t a nasty, cruel streak a protagonist somehow has to get through pretty much what the Evil Dead films (apart from Army of the Dead, a film too stupid for it) have always been? These are films whose protagonists have always been pushed into hacking nasty versions of the people they love into little pieces, so I don’t think it’s fair, or even makes sense to me, to complain when a film is simply particularly good at stressing you out, like this one is.

So, obviously, I come down on the side that finds Evil Dead Burn to be a fantastic film, nasty on the level of its pretty extreme violence as well as in the many ways it reproduces the particular emotional resonance of realistic abuse, but very much so in a manner I found as cathartic as I found it exhausting. Add to this an incredible control about how to pace this sort of affair – this one feels like a train running amuck, but somehow still stops at every station on its timetable – and a gloriously messed-up imagination about what to do to human bodies and human minds, and you have quite the piece of horror filmmaking, with a heroine who rings absolutely true as an abuse survivor to me.