Evil Dead Burn: New Horror Film Returns to Franchise's Claustrophobic Roots

In 1979, childhood friends Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi ventured to a remote cabin in Northern Michigan to film a horror short. That 32-minute movie, Within the Woods, became their calling card, securing enough funding from local investors to produce a full-length feature: The Evil Dead. This launched a franchise that has endured for decades.

Most recently, 2023’s Evil Dead Rise relocated the Book of the Dead’s chaos to a big-city high-rise, far from the franchise’s rustic origins. However, the first trailer for Evil Dead Burn signals a return to the franchise’s claustrophobic roots. While a few establishing shots show a large, empty house, the rest of the trailer is an unbroken shot of a woman named Alice (Souheila Yacoub) crawling through the unfolding nightmare. The chaos includes growling figures, bodies tossed about, and environmental scares—such as a clock crashing to the floor.

An official synopsis released with the trailer reveals that Evil Dead Burn follows Alice as she visits her in-laws’ home, only to discover they have been transformed into Deadites. Neither the synopsis nor the trailer identifies who unleashed the unholy forces by reading from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis. Given the recent trend of toxic relationship films like The Drama, speculation points to Alice’s husband as the culprit.

The film is directed by Sébastien Vaniček, the French filmmaker behind the 2023 debut Infested, which combined social commentary with visceral horror. While gore is a staple of the Evil Dead franchise—especially after the 2013 Fede Álvarez reboot stripped away humor in favor of relentless violence—the potential for social commentary could add depth to a story about Hellish monsters consuming souls.

Whatever Vaniček and co-writer Florent Bernard intend, the Evil Dead Burn trailer feels like a return to the franchise’s core principles. The original films thrived on chaos confined to a single space, typically a cabin where Ash Williams battled Deadites alone. While Álvarez and Lee Cronin, who directed Evil Dead Rise before tackling The Mummy, have reimagined this premise, they haven’t always leveraged the setting as effectively as Raimi did. In Evil Dead II, Ash’s descent into madness isn’t just from demonic attacks—it’s also because the cabin itself seems to turn against him.

As parts of the house collapse in the Evil Dead Burn trailer, there’s hope that Vaniček will make the house itself an active participant in the terror, much like the original films. Even if that’s not the plan, the trailer makes one thing clear: Evil Dead Burn will carry forward the legacy that Raimi and Campbell began.