Evil Dead Burn (2026)

****/****
starring Souheila Yacoub, Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan
written by Sébastien Vaniček & Florent Bernard
directed by Sébastien Vaniček

by Walter Chaw The day my dad died, I was unavailable by phone until evening. My voicemail was full of messages to go to the hospital–there’d been another heart attack and where was I? Hurry. Hurry. When I finally got there, I was directed to a waiting area, where my mom was already camped out with other members of her cult. She pointed to a door. I went through it to find my dad on a gurney, in a shiny black body bag. Eventually, someone came in and unzipped it so I could look at him: blue and ashen and cold. When I returned to the waiting area, I offered my mother a hug, but she pushed me away and turned back to the coterie of strangers collected there, measuring me. I measured them back. A few days later, at the funeral that my dad didn’t want, one of them blamed me for his death. At the unwanted funeral where I was forced to genuflect before an open casket my father definitely did not want, I was confronted with the sight of him now rouged to a garish purple because white morticians don’t know what to do with yellow skin, his blood replaced by a humectant to keep him moist amid our arid environment. Just for a while, you know, until we incinerated him and swept his ashes into a cardboard box we kept in a drawer for years before dumping them out into a lake.

There is a scene in Sébastien Vaniček’s Evil Dead Burn where a mother dies and becomes possessed by a demonic entity. She levitates above her deathbed and opens her arms to her grown daughter, who–gratefully–accepts her embrace. I laughed long and hard, not for the first time and not for the last. Vaniček’s timing is uncanny, triphammer like a trapdoor spider’s. He understands that horror is the darkest of dark comedy, where the punchlines are existential body blows–shots to the liver that shut down the vagus nerve. Stephen King complained that Kubrick’s The Shining was trying to hurt people. Vaniček’s Evil Dead Burn is trying to hurt people, too. It hurts people. I laughed at the abovementioned scene because I recognized the absurdity of destroyed children desperate, despite everything, for the attention of parents who never should have been parents. How many times would I have forgiven everything? How many times was I weak and instantly reminded that closure is a sick lie, healing a fantasy, and kindness bait for an unusually cruel trap? I laughed because Vaniček fucking nailed it, the multifoliate signs and signifiers of abuse. And, not content to have driven the point deep into the dark, almost black, blood-rich tissue between bones, he just…keeps…hammering away at it, ’til it doesn’t hurt anymore.

Evil Dead Burn is Abigail’s Party via Peter Jackson’s Braindead: a grand guignol charnel house of a picture that may have the most extreme–the most emotionally lacerating–gore of any American film I’ve ever seen. I know people will point to the Terrifier trilogy, but–and this is less a criticism than acknowledgement of the point–I can’t take those movies as anything other than freakshow provocations. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy raised the bar earlier this year, layering a film of grue over its declining familial orbit and doing so brilliantly. But where The Mummy is tender in its machinations, Evil Dead Burn is mean. Barbed-hook mean. A point brought home in an opening sequence involving fishing wire that reminded me of a passage from Thomas M. Disch’s The M.D. that has buried itself in my memory. Evil Dead Burn would pair well not only with Cronin’s film but also with Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks and Aleshea Harris’s standout shot across the patriarchal bow, Is God Is. They’re family films if, as a dear friend is fond of saying, your family is the Manson Family. The effects, as nasty and intimate as they are, don’t suggest gags intended to shock children so much as metaphors for being trapped in a family that doesn’t work. You’re on a raft with your tormentors, adrift in stagnant ponds teeming with monsters. Appropriately, Evil Dead Burn opens with two pals on a fishing trip when the green deep belches forth a monster summoned by the misadventures of a long-dead ancestor. There’s no escaping the sins of our fathers. We are scarecrows stuffed with dry leaves. We are made to burn. Evil Dead Burn is a rather remarkable feat of trauma deconstruction that helps me to understand why I can cut off close relationships like flicking a housefly’s head off its stalk. Isolation confirms my worldview. Rejection is the only thing that’s real. It’s terrible to live life this way.

Even the brutal murder of another Wasian woman (following the feckless perversions of Obsession and Backrooms) felt right to me in Evil Dead Burn. Systemic, generational trauma is what this movie is about; the unexamined attraction/revulsion with this particular racial archetype in the West is just another of the unconscious taboos Evil Dead Burn violently excavates. Sweet Thya (Luciane Buchanan, of Scottish and Polynesian descent), partner to milquetoast Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and erstwhile sister-in-law to our hero, Alice (Souheila Yacoub), is the Wasian in question, doomed to be the victim of Joseph’s impotence in the face of his father’s tyrannical, intrusive masculinity. Alice has decided to pay her ex-husband’s awful family a visit upon the occasion of his horrific death via car crash/Deadite speedbump/immolation. A husband who abused her and from whom she only recently escaped. I don’t know how good this film is at detailing the wake of domestic abuse. There are better minds than mine who can speak on that, and they’ll perhaps find Evil Dead Burn wanting. But the way it essays how violence is nursed in the home like a carnivorous plant in a suffocating hothouse is sharp. Angry. Above all, familiar.

The grieving mother is Susan (Tandi Wright). The father is Edgar (Erroll Shand). The grandmother/matriarch is Polly (Maude Davey). Each in their way is a perfect example of emotional brutality so practiced, so normalized, that the malefactors seem barely invested in their malevolence. Evisceration is simply how they communicate. It’s their lingua franca. There’s no premeditation to the design of their little earthquakes. A dinner sequence early on, during which Edgar is constantly, quietly relieved of a series of weapons as his irritation grows (“Um, can you pass me the corkscrew?”), is hilarious and tense, the portrait of a mantis preparing to strike. Edgar is a jack-in-the-box accruing menace in its last couple of cranks. He is the manifestation of Seth Brundle’s warning about insects: “They’re very brutal, no compassion, no compromise… I’m saying I’ll hurt you if you stay.” Alice, because of obligations she imagines she owes to the grieving family of her monstrous ex, stays. You don’t, by the way. Owe anything to your abusers, that is. You don’t even need to forgive them in death.

I imagine there will be a stark divide between hurt people who watch Evil Dead Burn and feel seen by it and hurt people who, for many of the same reasons, do not. For me, it joins something like Martyrs as a film I treasure that I can’t, generally speaking, recommend. It speaks to me. It acknowledges me, so I am helpless but to love it. It makes me realize I’m not the only person to ever feel like this about my family; not the only one who experiences a rage now and then so sudden and white hot that I believe I am capable of atrocity. The Deadites here sometimes cock their heads at the antics of this family in…is it admiration? Evil Dead Burn is a vision of Hell as a family reunion, a euphemism for the state of a world run by sociopathic men enabled all their lives in the progress of their Nietzschean psychoses, and whose influence doesn’t die with them. Sadism as power and legacy. Sadism is our cannibal god, and we worship it with tithes composed of the pieces flayed and carved from those who trust us not to hurt them. Fire makes metal stronger, but it obliterates flesh. Evil Dead Burn is a mortification of flesh: vicious and malign, fear forged into rancour. All of us have been beaten now into the image of the worst people to ever walk this green earth. It’s fascinating to me that this is also the central thesis of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey: another horror movie about the death of our humanity.

There’s a scene late in the film where Edgar, after having blown most of his own head off, takes his wife in a passionate clinch. As they break, Susan gasps, “You haven’t kissed me like that in ages,” and everyone laughs. It’s funny. But it’s the moment this film broke me. I cried. Grief pumped out of me in petroleum-thick sobs. Evil Dead Burn is about everything that’s been taken from us. That has died in us and rotted there. It’s about how abuse robs us of the ability to experience joy and the courage to provide it for others. What people don’t tell you about a toothache is that if you press on it hard enough, for long enough, the brightness of the pain subsides for a while. I stayed to watch Evil Dead Burn again after it was over, yet I had to turn away from it repeatedly: the dog violence, the child maiming… The most innocent aren’t spared the sadness of this world–haven’t we learned that repeatedly, a bludgeon’s lesson, this past year? Evil Dead Burn is vile and disgusting. As it should be.