It’s been a decade — almost to the day — since Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead reboot hit multiplex screens and revived enough active interest in the series for Starz to greenlight a continuation of the original Bruce Campbell-led iteration and have it last for three solid seasons on pay cable. Hell, with the post-credits tease at the end of that film, one could argue that Ash vs. Evil Dead was the real sequel, and that Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise is more just a spin-off than anything else. But the question remains the same: aside from brand recognition, why make a sequel to a popular-but-not-overwhelmingly-so reboot a full ten years after its release, after its director moved on to make movies about a blind Stephen Lang trying to fuck up some thieves? Well, the answer is pretty clear once you sit down to watch Rise: Cronin’s synthesis of Alveraz’s stylistic innovations and Sam Raimi’s thrill-ride approach to the delights of the genre is flat-out irresistible once it starts to unfold. It’s a nasty, brutish nightmare with a streak of puckish comedy at its core that delights in making one squirm as much as it does eliciting an illicit chuckle at the proceedings, a maximalist endeavor so far removed from Cronin’s origins as one of the bright talents of Irish elevated horror cinema that you’d be stunned this was the same director who dropped an A24 horror release just a few years back.
Or perhaps you wouldn’t be. Both Rise and Cronin’s previous film, The Hole in the Ground are centered around motherhood, but with the roles inverted: where the latter saw a mother fearing for her changed son, Rise is about what happens when the spirits of the damned Raimi-cam their way into a mother of three. If one wanted, they could extrapolate a pretty goofy conservative commentary on the film’s cast of characters, though it doesn’t hold much water given how much Cronin loves them. Our victim is Ellie (Alyssa Sullivan), a tattoo artist and single mom to three kids, each of whom seems to resemble a type of modern-day liberal youth. There’s Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), an environmentalist and protester, Danny (Morgan Davies), a wannabe DJ, and young Kassie (Nell Fisher), who is artsy and creepy in the way that some free-range kids are, popping the heads off of dolls and turning them into staffs of protection from the ghosts that a neighbor says haunts their soon-to-be-condemned building. The foursome is surprised by a visit from our protagonist, Beth (Lily Sullivan), a successful roadie and tech who has taken some time off of the tour she’s running to consult her sister Ellie about the fact that she’s somehow found herself with a bun in the oven.
Beth and Ellie’s relationship has become strained with distance, and Beth’s been downright absent during the worst periods of her sister’s life, going so far as to bring a gift for Ellie’s absent husband from her travels overseas without realizing that he left her. Ellie sends the kids out to get some pizza so that the sisters can argue in peace, but as soon as the three return to their building’s parking garage with three pies and an assortment of sodas, an earthquake strikes — this is LA, after all — and the three duck for cover. The pizza is ruined, but everyone’s ok, at least until Danny notices that there’s a hole in the ground. While their sisters wait up top and beg them to come back, Danny makes their way into the hole, seeing what they think is an abandoned bank vault down below, ripe with long-forgotten trinkets for the plucking. Only problem is that it’s storage for some Catholic church, with an odd fleshy book and a bunch of old vinyl records laying about. Danny thinks that they might be able to pawn this, at least, so they take the book and the records back up top and play them, unleashing an evil spirit in the process, which goes straight for Ellie. It soon becomes clear to the kids that something is not quite right with Mom, and they’ll have to figure out some way to escape the building (hard, given that the elevator looks pretty fucked and the stairs are gone) if they can’t reverse the spell.
Already, you’ve probably noticed how different this feels from the nihilism of the last Evil Dead. Though Cronin’s aims here are different than Alvarez’s, they’re both rooted in a sense of fidelity to the material. Alvarez wanted to go back to the roots of the series as bleak-and-gruesome horror, and succeeded wildly at that if at the expense of the film as a whole — it’s 90 minutes of hell and chaos unleashed on the viewer, grounded in an exceptionally thin group of characters serving more as meat puppets that have been primed with explosive devices rather than as facsimiles of recognizable human beings. Evil Dead Rise sees its predecessor’s accomplishments for what they were and retains as much of its grimy sense of visual style and horrifically realized gore, and you can tell that Cronin had a blast putting this together. It’s not impossibly novel in the creations and scenarios that it presents the viewer (though I’ll be real, there’s one bit involving a piece of glass that had me genuinely wincing at its bloody creativity) but it’s executed with a pitch-perfect and stomach-churning thoroughness that it stands on par with its immediate antecedent.
But, again, we’re dealing with a whole franchise here, and it’s remarkable how wonderfully Rise acts a bridge between the high-camp world of Ash Williams and the New French Extremity-influenced revamp. Even if it’s bereft of many of the series’ most recognizable elements — the Necromomicon is an off-brand variation, the Deadites are a bit more generic compared to their other manifestations, and the world’s greatest chin is absent aside from a producer credit — it still feels more like a Raimi movie than practically any of the man’s actual protégés have ever approximated. Alexandre Aja — an actual child of the NFE — came close with the Raimi-produced Crawl, but Aja was an established talent at that point in his career and as such had a more firmly established style. On the other hand, Cronin is at an early enough moment to oscillate genre styles in a wholly organic way. There’s not a ton in common between this and his first film, the more conventionally-executed elevated horror of The Hole in the Ground, and it’s proof of his skill that both of his approaches work well for their respective films’ subject matter.
The secret is in the film’s tightrope walk of tones, and how skillfully they’re executed as a cohesive roller-coaster ride. Rise is scary, but not relentlessly so; it’s gross, but not reliant on that wholly for shock value; and it is funny, but not enough to break the spell. That last part is key to the Raimi formula – like in a Joe Dante film, you want the sort of cartoony and wackadoodle possibilities that an overly ridiculous genre (in this manifestation) deserves to maintain that heightened effect — and managing dual involuntary reactions is a tough ask. The humor is never wholly overt like, say, the Ash vs. Hand sequence in Evil Dead II or any of the one-liners Bruce Campbell tosses off, but in the more subtle gags, created in the edit, like Raimi used in Drag Me to Hell (though there is a very silly allusion to The Shining that pays off well enough to rise above mere homage). It’s a kind of silliness that helps the bitterness of the irony and tragedy go down easier and it helps keep the film fun in a way that wasn’t a priority for the 2013 installment. The end is a genuinely goofy laugh that feels plucked out of the causation/consequences world of Raimi’s Evil Dead sequels. Anyhow, Evil Dead Rise is the kind of horizon-broadening horror sequel — a back-to-basics approach that retains the aesthetic development of its direct predecessor — that the genre needs as it slowly emerges from the Elevated Horror era. It serves as a reminder that we can have our cake — brutality and terror — and enjoy eating it as well, instead of pushing our faces into stolid formalism and “seriousness,” where the filmmakers make post-hoc justifications for your practical enjoyment for the film. Groovy.