Editorials
‘Evil Dead Burn’ Mid and Post Credit Scenes Raise Big Questions [Spoilers]
The Evil Dead universe expands this weekend with the arrival of Evil Dead Burn in theaters, unleashing a demonic siege upon a grieving family. Director Sébastien Vaniček doles out a gauntlet of pain from beginning to end, and that includes the credits.
While Evil Dead Rise skipped out on credit scenes, Evil Dead Burn follows 2013’s Evil Dead with the inclusion of a mid-credit scene and a post-credit scene, extending the Deadite mayhem to the very end.
Vaniček uses the mid-credit scene for levity, injecting one last punchline of gallows humor regarding the Price family. It also raises questions on where that carnage leads. But it’s the post-credit scene that holds larger franchise implications, sure to get fans talking.
It also doesn’t make much sense.
Warning: Major spoilers ahead!
Evil Dead Burn directly ties to Evil Dead Rise, with a possessed Jessica (portrayed in the new movie by Greta Van Den Brink) brutally dispatching a pair of fishermen before leaving the lake in search of those in possession of the Kandarian dagger: the Price family. Deadite Jessica kicks off a new wave of terror when she targets eldest son Will (George Pullar), using him as a Trojan horse into his family.
The Evil Dead Rise connections come full circle in Burn‘s post-credit scene, bringing back a fan-favorite Deadite.
In this scene, the daughter of the cremator hired to handle Will’s remains gets curious about a shelf of unclaimed ashes. Among them are the ashes of Ellie Bixler. The girl, left alone while her mom is tending to a client, hears a voice she mistakes for her mother. It’s not.
The voice guides her to a mirror, where she sees not her reflection but that of Deadite Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland). Ellie wastes no time dispatching the child, claiming with a grin, “Mommy’s back.“
Sutherland’s Deadite performance remains a standout in this franchise, but Ellie’s appearance here doesn’t make much sense beyond fan service. Evil Dead Rise final girl Beth (Lily Sullivan) reduces Ellie, who’d assimilated into the Marauder, to a bloody pulp via tree shredder in the film’s climax. There’s not a lot of flesh or sinew left to cremate, to start. To really get into semantics, the Marauder was an amalgam of multiple Deadites in one, so separating her remains from, say, Danny’s (Morgan Davies) or the neighbors seems like an impossible task.
The Marauder in Evil Dead Rise
It’s also jarring in that Deadites tend to prefer to make their torment personal. Ellie has zero connection to this random child. To further nitpick, there are likely much closer crematoriums to Ellie’s home, even if the lake and Price household are in the general region.
Most of all, Vaniček plays so fast and loose with the Deadite possession rules that this scene breaks from the established norms in a confusing way. There’s no dagger here or incantation to summon a demon, so it’s not clear how just being in the presence of her ashes summons her here.
Does any of this really matter? Not at all. The haplessness of this scene’s inclusion doesn’t seem to suggest anything other than a fun momentary reprise of a fan favorite character. It does, however, seem to leave the door wide open for Ellie’s full return.
It’ll be a while before we find out if that is indeed the intention behind this scene; the next is Evil Dead Wrath from director Francis Galluppi (The Last Stop in Yuma County), set for theatrical release on April 7, 2028. It’ll predate all Evil Dead films with its 1972 setting.
Evil Dead Rise
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
You must be logged in to post a comment.