'Evil Dead Burn' Officially Carves Up an Impressive Rotten Tomatoes Score

The latest entry in the Evil Dead franchise, Evil Dead Burn, is set to release in theaters this week, providing the horror genre with another gory, blood-soaked installment in the long-standing franchise. First conceived by Sam Raimi in 1981, the franchise struggled to find its identity outside Raimi’s entries. Following the release of his third film, Army of Darkness, in 1993, Alien: Romulus director Fede Álvarez attempted to reinvigorate the franchise with his 2013 entry, Evil Dead, which featured a new cast of characters and a post-credits scene connecting it to the original film. It took another 10 years before the franchise finally found a path forward through an almost anthology-style release format.

Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise brought the franchise much-needed critical and financial success, justifying another release. Rather than follow the sequel format of previous entries, Rise and Burn instead have loose plot connections that help transition to a new set of characters. Specifically, the Deadite at the end of Evil Dead Rise appears briefly in Burn to advance the plot. This time around, filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček is behind the camera as director and co-writer of the screenplay with Florent Bernard. The movie tells the story of a grieving widow named Alice, who is at a secluded winter home with her in-laws.

The Book of the Dead and the Deadites that follow slowly tear the family apart, setting the stage for a grisly, intense film. The first reviews for Evil Dead Burn have been submitted to the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, and it seems the franchise has another success on its hands. At the time of this writing, Evil Dead Burn has an 80% “Fresh” rating based on 50 reviews. Nearly all the positive reviews say the same thing about the film: it’s the goriest and bloodiest Evil Dead film to date.

A still from the movie 'Evil Dead Burn' — A still from the movie ‘Evil Dead Burn’

There are some detractors of this latest entry, such as a review by Nerdist, which calls the movie “comfortably the worst of the franchise” and a “gore-soaked disappointment.” MovieWeb‘s own review gave the movie a low rating, calling Evil Dead Burn a “gruesome and unforgiving technical exercise in mindless carnage.” It seems that both the negative and positive reviews of the movie have in common the acknowledgment of just how brutal it can get. The Evil Dead franchise is known for very punishing set pieces for characters possessed by Deadites, often involving blood and dismemberment.

It will be interesting to see how well Evil Dead Burn performs at the box office, especially since another movie is already on the way. Evil Dead Wrath is set to release on Apr. 7, 2028, and is written and directed by Francis Galluppi. Interestingly, Wrath will serve as a prequel to the original Evil Dead movie, taking place in 1972. After a decade of struggling to find a way forward, it seems that the Evil Dead series has finally figured out how to deliver loosely connected narratives that deliver on gore and scares. With an 80% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Evil Dead Burns’ critical reception suggests that this new formula may work for the horror franchise.