With only five films released over the course of 45 years, the Evil Dead series is one of the few horror franchises that can claim that it’s never had a bad installment ... yet. The closest the series has come to a critical miss was in 2013 with the dark, gritty reboot Evil Dead, directed by Fede Alvarez; that film scored an indifferent 64 percent with critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, although 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, directed by Lee Cronin (you know, of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy?), brought both back into the fold with a respectable 85 percent/75 percent split.
Compared to the decade-long hiatus between the last two Evil Dead movies, the three years that have passed between Evil Dead Rise and the upcoming sixth installment in the (film — Don’t forget Ash Vs. Evil Dead) series, Evil Dead Burn, seems like nothing. Carrying on another tradition of giving up-and-coming horror filmmakers a boost, French director Sébastien Vaniček takes over for this newest film after his creepy-crawly debut feature Infested in 2023. That film took place in the cramped confines of a high-rise apartment block in suburban Paris, and was packed full of the inventive camerawork and high-intensity horror action that have characterized the latter-day Evil Dead movies.
