©
When the first trailer for “Rise of the Evil Dead” hit the web in January, horror fans took to social media to comment on one particular moment in the clip: Ellie’s possessed mother using a cheese grater on her sister’s leg. Now director Lee Cronin has “warned” fans of the genre that there are many more shocking scenes in the sequel.
I definitely didn’t hold back. My own taste is: “Yes, you will see the knife go in.” But this is not torture porn. To me, the Evil Dead shouldn’t be like that, because I want as soon as you say, “Oh shit!”, guess what? Now something else is going to happen.
Cronin goes on to say that what he most admires about the franchise, which began with Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead over four decades ago and was continued by Fede Alvarez in 2013, is that each installment is constantly being updated.
I wanted it to be a roller coaster. As soon as something has happened and you take a breath, the next one comes crashing down on you. Such is the pace of the film. You won’t be able to tell this story with the relentless engine if you spend too much time contemplating the blood.
Rise of the Evil Dead takes place several years after Ash Williams and his buddies stumbled upon the Necronomicon in the early 1980s. Beth (Lily Sullivan) makes a stopover at her sister Ellie’s home in Los Angeles in the middle of a long journey. There, she discovers that Ellie is struggling to raise her three children in a cramped apartment – a task made even more difficult when Ellie is possessed by a demon, discovering a strange book in the bowels of the building.
There is a direct connection between what happens in this story and in others. They are in the same world – it is by no means a parallel universe. It happened after Fedi’s movie and after Sam’s movie, but in a world where these stories took place. The book in question in this story is connected to the past. If we look at Army of Darkness, and the fact that there are three books, Sam used one, Fede used another, and I said, “You know what, give me a third, and let me tell the Evil Dead story in this context.
