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Evil Dead Burn Had Everything I Wanted. So Why Did I Leave Disappointed?
- Sakshi D
- 4 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Burn is gory, occasionally brilliant, and frustratingly hollow where it counts
I was excited for this one. Genuinely, properly excited.
Evil Dead Rise is one of my favourite horror films in recent memory, and when I found out Evil Dead Burn had Hunter Doohan and Luciane Buchanan in the cast, I was basically already in the cinema.
Hunter Doohan playing Tyler in Wednesday is enough reason to watch almost anything. Luciane Buchanan was brilliant in The Night Agent. The director Sébastien Vaniček, came off the back of Infested, which was genuinely terrifying. The pieces were all there. And then I watched it and spent most of the runtime waiting for it to hit the way Evil Dead Rise hit. It never quite did.
Evil Dead Burn follows Alice, played by Souheila Yacoub, a woman who loses her husband and travels to his family's remote, deeply creepy home to grieve with her in-laws. The family turns out to have a very specific and very cursed history with the Necronomicon, the Book of the Dead. One by one, they start turning.
The family reunion from hell premise has potential, and the film does some genuinely interesting things with the lore, particularly around the grandfather's bloodline and the cult connected to the book. I actually wanted more of that. What I got instead was a lot of waiting.
TMJ Rating: 🍿🍿/5
What Worked In My Opinion
The lore is the most interesting thing this franchise has done in a while. Previous Evil Dead films kept the Necronomicon deliberately mysterious, which worked until it didn't. Burn actually gives it history, a family lineage, a cult connection, stakes beyond just surviving the night. That direction genuinely excited me, and I hope Evil Dead Wrath, which is set in 1973 as a prequel, picks that thread up and runs with it properly.
The gore is exactly as advertised. The franchise was apparently handed an NC-17 before trimming it down to an R, and honestly, you can feel where that line was. When it goes for it, it really goes for it. Two post-credits scenes are also doing interesting work setting up where the franchise goes next, including a callback to Evil Dead Rise that has me intrigued.
The camera work throughout is sharp. Vaniček has a specific visual language, and it shows. There are moments where he elevates what could have been a completely standard scene into something that feels unsettling and distinct. You can tell this is a director with a real eye and not just someone handed a franchise and told to make it loud.
Where Evil Dead Burn Lost Me
Hunter Doohan and Luciane Buchanan are both here and both largely wasted.
Doohan's Joseph gets an interesting character concept, someone too afraid to commit to anything, but the arc that should come from that never fully arrives. He stays frustratingly static for most of the runtime in ways that feel like a missed opportunity rather than a deliberate choice.
Buchanan as Thya has even less to work with and disappears from the story far too early. I genuinely came for both of them and left feeling like neither got the material they deserved.
The Deadites themselves felt strangely defanged compared to Rise. In Rise, they were terrifying and unpredictable. Here, they feel like they're pulling punches for reasons the plot tries to explain but never quite convinces you of. The intimidation factor that made Rise so relentless is just not present in the same way.
The pacing is also a real problem. The film runs close to two hours and earns maybe 90 minutes of that. The final sequence with a badly rendered CGI villain drags the whole thing past its natural ending point and looks genuinely rough compared to the practical effects that preceded it. The film should have ended 15 minutes earlier and been significantly stronger for it.
The characters outside of Alice and, to some extent, Susan, played by Tandi Wright, don't get enough development for you to feel anything when things go wrong for them.
Evil Dead Rise worked because you were emotionally invested before the chaos started. Here, the chaos arrives before the investment does.
My Final Verdict
Evil Dead Burn is not a bad film. It's a competent, occasionally impressive, sometimes genuinely disgusting horror movie that does interesting new things with the franchise's mythology. But Evil Dead Rise was great, and this is not it.
The cast had more to give than the script allowed, the pacing needed another editing pass, and the ending overstays its welcome by a significant margin.
What frustrates me most is that the bones of something really special are here. The lore is the most ambitious the franchise has been. Vaniček clearly has vision. Yacoub as Alice is a strong enough lead to carry a better film than this one. But the whole thing never quite comes together the way it needed to.
I'm still showing up for Evil Dead Wrath. The franchise has earned that much. But this one needed more time in the edit.
Are you an Evil Dead girlie who has thoughts about where Burn lands in the ranking? Tell me in the comments because I have a lot of feelings and not enough people to argue with about it.