To again recap, the next movie in the Evil Dead franchise is currently titled Evil Dead Rise, it’s being directed by Lee Cronin (The Hole in the Ground), it won’t feature Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams, and it’s not going to be set at a cabin in the woods. Rumored but unconfirmed at this time is that the movie will be set in some kind of high-rise/skyscraper.
“I’m confident I’m going to do something that’s both familiar and refreshing. I’m gonna deliver a rollercoaster of horror,” Lee Cronin recently told BD’s The Boo Crew Podcast. “That’s what the goal is here. Relentless. Not stopping to explain too much. It needs to be extremely visceral, highly entertaining, properly scary. To push boundaries, that’s important as well.”
Chatting with AL.com this week, producer Bruce Campbell spilled a few more beans, revealing that Evil Dead Rise – like Evil Dead 2013 before it – will feature a female heroine.
“What we’re doing now is we’re saying, ‘Look, this is another Evil Dead movie and that book gets around, a lot of people run into it and it’s another story.’ The main key with Evil Dead is they’re just regular people who are battling what seems to be a very unstoppable evil, and so that’s where the horror comes from,” Campbell explains. “It’s not someone who’s skilled. They’re not fighting a soldier. They’re not fighting a scientist. They’re not fighting anybody more than your average neighbor. This one is going to be a similar thing.”
He continues, “We’re going to have a heroine, a woman in charge, and she’s going to try and save her family.”
Campbell also generally updated on the project, noting: “We’re honing-in, circling the building now trying to lock in a partner. We have a couple of bidders and we’re trying to just find the correct suitor and we have a script written and a director picked. And it’s got a very good modern tale. It’s a modern-day urban Evil Dead. And we’re hoping to do that next year.”
Female heroines, beginning with Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead and Jane Levy’s Mia, have been at the center of the franchise for several years now, with the Starz series “Ash vs. Evil Dead” introducing us to Kelly Maxwell (Dana DeLorenzo) and Brandy Barr (Arielle Carver-O’Neill). Brandy, it turned out, was actually Ash’s daughter, becoming a Deadite-slayer in her own right.
More as we learn it!
