THE MUMMY'S CURSE

A DEMONIC FORCE HAS AWAKENED FROM ITS ANCIENT SLUMBERS FOR EVIL DEAD RISE, AND THIS TIME IT HAS A FAMILY TO TORMENT... DIRECTOR LEE CRONIN TELLS US MORE

- IAN BERRIMAN

It's coming home, it's coming home, it's coming, the Force is coming home. No, not Star Wars' Force, but the demonic entity from The Evil Dead - the one that zooms through the woods, toppling trees, on its way to possessing people and turning them into cackling, deformed killers known as Deadites.

And it's not coming home to its old stomping ground of Tennessee, but to Los Angeles. Because uniquely, the fifth entry in the now 42-year-old series - perhaps horror's most gleefully excessive franchise- unfolds not in the traditional setting of a cabin in the woods, but (for the most part) in an ordinary family apartment. Just because this is domestic horror, however, don't make the mistake of thinking that the Deadites have been domesticated... 

DEAD KEEN 

Evil Dead Rise is a coming home of sorts for Lee Cronin too. The second feature for the Irish director, after 2019’s The Hole In The Ground, it brings things full circle. Because Cronin was possessed by a love for Sam Raimi’s ’80s Evil Dead movies at an eyebrow-raisingly young age… “I saw The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II when I was about eight or nine,” the director tells SFX, “back to back on VHS – my dad had rented them. In my household, there were no age restrictions on anything.”

Though it’s too late to phone social services, you may be thinking that this could have (given an abundance of bodily dismemberment) disastrously warped the little Lee’s brain. Happily, it instead helped place him on the path towards becoming a horror director. Er, if there’s any distinction there…