To most people below the age of 40, Sam Raimi’s most iconic film franchise is the first Spider-Man trilogy. However, Raimi gained a reputation two decades earlier for a different franchise: The Evil Dead.
The film that put Raimi on the map was The Evil Dead (1981), involving supernatural demons that possess a group of friends after they discover a recording of incantations from The Necronomicon.
Critical reception to the first three movies was mixed—critics found the combination of gratuitous, low-budget gore and slapstick comedy to be bizarre and off-putting in tone; however, the franchise gained a cult following in the decades since.
In 2013, and again in 2023, the series was rebooted with Evil Dead and Evil Dead Rise, which controversially diverted the series from its comedy-horror roots into the territory of pure horror. This is where we sit today, with the 2026 release of Evil Dead Burn, which follows a family dealing with the horrifying death of one of its adult sons in a fiery car crash.
Unbeknownst to them, the crash was caused by the re-emergence of the demonic force which possesses people, turning them into nearly invulnerable undead creatures. This force infiltrates the family, causing them to violently turn on one another.
Newcomers will be bewildered, as the plot is nearly nonexistent and relies heavily on prior knowledge of the series and its supernatural premises. Some brief exposition mentions the Book of the Dead, a magical dagger, and shows some spooky drawings, and that’s about it.
The only strong moment in the film happens over a miserable family dinner where resentment, grief, and anger grow to a boiling point, eventually erupting. The scene is shot with a series of close-ups, lending a claustrophobic, oppressive aura that mirrors the agonizing emotional turbulence of each individual at the table.
What follows is an exhausting series of violent encounters that drags the viewer through most of the two-hour runtime. Scenes such as an extended make-out session between an old woman and a possessed corpse exist purely to gross out the audience. Another scene involves a character loosely bound to a chair by one leg. Does she A) easily pull the leg free? B) use a steak knife to cut through the thin straps? or C) use the knife to cut off her own leg at the thigh while laughing maniacally, just to make a spectacle? You guessed it.
The original films were also ridiculous and gratuitous, but there was a continuity of action and a charming personality to the low-budget slop and charismatic protagonist that is lost in Burn, with its mindless, forgettable characters and random, disconnected contrivances that serve no function other than to disgust. The result is a film that feels empty and trite, indistinguishable from hundreds of other cheap horror flicks on the market.
If you’re a fan of the original movies, go watch them again. I just saw Evil Dead Burn yesterday, and I’ve already forgotten it.