Review: Evil Dead Burn (2026)

Evil Dead Burn (2026)

Rated R for strong bloody horror violence and gore, and language

Score: 3 out of 5

There's a scene early in Evil Dead Burn that hinted at the better movie that it felt like director Sébastien Vaniček and his co-writer Florent Bernard were going for. While seated at a dinner table with her in-laws following the funeral of her husband William, our protagonist Alice is being interrogated by William's parents, who never really welcomed her into the family and always made excuses for their son, who we find out was abusing her before he died in an accident (actually caused by a demon) that they blame her for. We, the viewers, know that the father Edgar is succumbing to possession by the dark powers that, in the Evil Dead universe, turn you into a Deadite, the series' intelligent, demon-possessed version of zombies. The characters, however, do not, and watching both Edgar and the mother Susan yell at Alice, it's kind of difficult to tell which of them is in the early stages of a Deadite transformation and which one is simply being an asshole. This is probably my favorite scene in the film even before it finally climaxes with Edgar fully turning into a monster, and had the rest of it kept up that energy, of being trapped in a house with a family that hates you, it would easily be among my favorite films in this series.

As it stands, though, while I still maintain that there's never been a bad Evil Dead movie, a hell of a feat for a horror franchise on its sixth installment (not counting the spinoff TV show Ash vs. Evil Dead), this one would probably be my least favorite if I had to rank them. It treads on very similar ground to the previous film Evil Dead Rise in how it centers a dysfunctional family as the main characters, and I'd argue that that film did so more effectively, with this one winding up feeling very thin on plot after the halfway mark in favor of both franchise lore that it never really did anything with and increasingly grueling set pieces of brutal violence. That said, "my least favorite Evil Dead film" is still a hell of a ride. It felt like the New French Extremity version of an Evil Dead film, like two French filmmakers homaging the 2000s golden age of ultraviolent French horror movies like High Tension and Frontier(s) that put characters through everything they could think to throw at them, with those violent set pieces feeling legitimately brutal and often making me wince. Even if I don't think Vaniček and Bernard were quite the right people to make an Evil Dead movie, they did at least make an entertaining movie, and this series in its post-Sam Raimi/Bruce Campbell era becoming a proving ground for rising horror filmmakers like them, Lee Cronin, and Fede Álvarez isn't a direction I can really complain about.

The main characters this time are the Price family, consisting of the parents Edgar and Susan, Susan's dementia-ridden mother Polly, their adult sons Joseph and William, Joseph's girlfriend Thya, and William's wife Alice... at least, until William dies in a flaming car wreck caused by a demon. You see, Susan's late father Benjamin was into the occult, Joseph had discovered his old grandfather's notes and recordings, and the demons Benjamin had tried to seal away smell blood in the water and come after his family as revenge, nailing William first and using him to get to the rest of them. While the rest of the family responds with varying levels of grief, Alice doesn't seem particularly bothered by her husband's death, as their marriage had been an abusive one that was falling apart, her last words to William being "go to Hell" amidst an argument outside a nightclub. And her in-laws, who always saw her (a French woman William met in Paris) as an outsider who didn't belong in their family, certainly noticed, which they make very clear after the funeral.

If those two stories, that of Benjamin's occult research coming back to bite his descendants and Alice's tension with her in-laws, don't really sound like they go together particularly well, then you'd be right. The entire point of Alice's character is that she's an outsider to the Price family, and while Souheila Yacoub delivered a fine, badass performance as Alice, thematically the film sells this feeling too well. We have little connection to things like Susan's relationship with her parents or the Price family's history with the occult, which become increasingly important in the second half of the film, because we're seeing it all through the eyes of somebody who married into the family and was always distant from them barring the now-deceased William. To put it frankly, I think Joseph should've been the main character, not Alice, or at least should've had a meatier co-protagonist role. He inadvertently released the demons that killed his brother William and now threaten the rest of his family, giving him a personal stake in the situation beyond just trying to get the hell out of there, and Hunter Doohan gave a similarly fine performance in the part. The protagonists in the 2013 reboot and Rise were far more close-knit groups, whether it was a young woman's friends staging an intervention for her or two sisters who had drifted apart over the years and had developed a fraught relationship, meaning that the horror of them getting possessed hit home as we were watching through the eyes of people who, whatever else they may have felt, still cared about them. While this movie tries to build a similar dynamic with the Prices and Alice, it doesn't work as effectively here. Alice would've made a great supporting character, someone who can call the Prices out on their bullshit more readily than Joseph can, but she wasn't the right lead for this movie.

Fortunately, even when the story was losing me, director Sébastien Vaniček still turned in a hell of a movie to watch as just a simple thrill ride, the sheer intensity thick enough for me to forgive shaky writing. The blood here flows like a geyser, and everybody, both human and Deadite, is put through grueling situations that ravage their bodies, from getting impaled on a bed of forks and knives in a dishwasher to getting a pen in the ear (and then having to slowly pull it out) to getting into knock-down, drag-out brawls to the self-mutilation that's become part and parcel of the series, most notably a scene where a Deadite shoots himself in the head multiple times just to show everyone else how unstoppable he is. It felt like a throwback to the 2000s era of ultraviolent horror movies both French and American, and more importantly, it recaptured what made the best, grimiest, most vicious examples of such work both then and now. What's more, the Deadites, with their horrifically cruel one-liners aimed at the survivors' insecurities, still packed more personality than your typical zombies. In addition to the dinner scene I described earlier, there's one scene where a character is tempted to the dark side that illustrates this very well, and which I think would've landed a lot better if I'd had more investment in this part of the plot instead of focusing chiefly on Alice. The performances from the whole cast, both human and Deadite, were on point as they proved ready, willing, and able to handle everything the filmmakers threw at them, with Yacoub in particular making for a great heroine even when the writing wasn't up to snuff. The filmmakers, being French, also gave her plenty of moments that highlighted that side of her, making for the kind of French woman who feels written by actual French people rather than a supporting character on Emily in Paris. Alice's nationality and accent did a lot of legwork in making her feel distant from the Prices even if they never explicitly spelled it out, creating an uncomfortable subtext of xenophobia in their interactions with her as it seemed at times like at least part of their resentment of her came from her not being the perfect "all-American" lover for William. (Especially given that Yacoub, as her name might indicate, isn't exactly 100% Caucasian, and Vaniček and Bernard's previous film, the killer spider flick Infested, contained a strong undercurrent of satire of life in France's suburban ghettoes.) From start to finish, I was at least having a bloody good time, even if there were numerous moments where it felt like there was a better movie under the surface waiting to come out.

The Bottom Line

Evil Dead Burn may be my least favorite Evil Dead film, and it may have tried to bite off a bit more than it could chew story-wise, but when the bar for this series is as high as it is, I'm not gonna complain too much about 109 minutes of near-nonstop carnage delivered on a silver platter. If you like these sorts of movies, then get in line.