EVIL DEAD BURN (2026)

Studio:   New Line Cinema
Director: Sebastien Vanicek
Writer:   Sebastien Vanicek, Florent Bernard
Producer: Rob Tapert, Sam Raimi
Stars:    Souheila Yacoub, Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan, Erroll Shand, Maude Davey, George Pullar

Review Score:

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Summary:

A young widow fights to survive a grueling nightmare when her abusive husband’s family succumbs to demonic possession in their remote lakehouse.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Looking for inspiration, aspiring writer Joseph Price goes through his grandfather Dr. Benjamin Price’s belongings in the attic of their family’s remote lakehouse. Joseph finds journals and audio recordings detailing Benjamin’s extensive occult research into the Necronomicon, flesh-possessing demons called “deadites,” and an ancient Kandarian dagger capable of sending the malevolent entities back to Hell. Benjamin’s recordings also stress that unsealing the hidden dagger will summon deadites to destroy it. Joseph finds the dagger in the attic, unknowingly resurrecting deadite Jessica, who previously became possessed during a cabin getaway. Jessica supernaturally slaughters two fishermen, Leo and Jared, at a nearby lake.

Accompanied by his girlfriend Thya, Joseph later celebrates his birthday at a restaurant and nightclub owned by his brother Will. Joseph and Thya grow uncomfortable when Will publicly fights with his French wife Alice, who has felt trapped in a troubled marriage by her abusive husband for some time. Upset over the altercation, Will drives off enraged even though his brother cautions he may be too drunk to drive.

Will rolls his car when he crashes into Jessica, who intentionally stood in the middle of a dark road. With Will trapped in the overturned wreckage, Jessica torments him before her head falls off. Jessica then supernaturally starts a fire that burns Will alive in the wreck.

Joseph and Thya meet Alice when she arrives at the crematorium for her husband’s funeral. Alice receives a cold greeting from Will’s parents, Susan and Edgar, who resent Alice for Will’s death as well as failing to start a family with him. Susan also attends to Will’s wheelchair-bound grandmother Polly, Benjamin Price’s elderly widow who suffers from dementia.

Following the service, Edgar asks for a private moment with his son’s body prior to cremation. With the deadite curse having transferred to him, Will’s charred corpse bursts out of its coffin to burn Edgar, causing him to become demonically possessed too. Responding to the commotion, the cremator returns to the room and is brutally killed by Will.

With the funeral over, Susan, Edgar, Polly, Alice, Joseph, and Thya retire to the family’s remote lakeside house. While setting up a bed in the attic, Susan sees that Joseph had been going through her father’s occult research. Susan calls the secret society Benjamin belonged to, The Circle of the Wise Men, a cult as she claims he was a bad man who neglected his family when they needed him most. Susan collects the journals and audio tapes in a trash bag she instructs Joseph to throw away.

Over dinner, the family has a tense conversation regarding Alice and Will’s problematic marriage. As an argument breaks out over blame for Will’s death, Edgar, who had already shown signs of worrisome behavior to Joseph and Alice, shocks everyone by suddenly stabbing the family’s dog, Max, to death with a fork.

Thya and Joseph try rushing Edgar to a hospital, but he turns violent again, causing the car to crash. Edgar brutally kills Thya with the metal prongs of a car seat headrest. Joseph flees in horror.

After burying the dead dog with Susan, Alice finds the trash bag containing Benjamin’s occult research. Alice reads about the dagger that can rip demonic souls from their bodies. She also reads about the Necronomicon, and she recites three of the four words from the deadite incantation aloud. Alice does not say the fourth and final word, yet Max still resurrects to attack her. Alice fights off the deadite dog.

Alice and Joseph both return to Susan in the main house in states of shock. Thya returns too, but as a deadite with the headrest still impaled through her head. Thya drinks hot wax from a candle in a mock toast to the Price family before attacking Susan. Joseph and Alice manage to throw Thya down a staircase to lock her in the cellar.

Alice, Joseph, and Susan escort Polly outside only to be confronted by Edgar and Max. Edgar pulls out a handgun he uses to repeatedly shoot himself in the head, but he does not die. The other four family members retreat back inside as Edgar continues standing still, staring intimidatingly at the house.

Thya convinces Polly to let her out of the basement. Thya attacks Susan, Alice, and Joseph while Polly ascends to the second floor in her mechanical chairlift.

With their fight spilling into the kitchen, Thya frightens Joseph into falling backward onto upturned utensils on an open dishwasher door. Having frequently exhibited cowardly behavior up to this point, Joseph fights back by stabbing Thya in her neck with a corkscrew, but she doesn’t die.

Thya leaves Joseph to confront Polly upstairs. Thya demands that Polly reveal where her husband hid the Kandarian dagger. Alice uses Polly’s prosthetic leg to knock Thya down the stairs. Joseph repeatedly smashes Thya’s head until it turns into bloody pulp, triggering a memory for Alice of Will’s physical abuse.

Alice asks Joseph about the Circle of the Wise Men. Joseph tells her more about his grandfather’s research into the Necronomicon, deadites, and ancient artifacts.

Meanwhile, Susan puts Polly to bed. Now possessed with the deadite curse, Polly speaks with a normal mind and voice, seducing Susan into a state of nostalgic reverie for her family. Edgar comes to the window. Susan unlocks it to let her husband inside. Despite his gruesome condition, Susan passionately kisses Edgar, causing her to acquire the deadite curse.

Beginning to show signs of possession, Susan returns downstairs to tell her son they can end their ordeal by giving the deadites the weapon her father supposedly stole from them. Hesitating, Joseph backs away from his mother. Edgar suddenly attacks Joseph, which upsets Susan. In response to her admonishment, Edgar uses a candelabra Susan sculpted to knock out his wife.

While Joseph tries fighting off his father, Alice tries to hide, but Polly confronts her. Polly stabs Alice in her ear with a keepsake pen Will gave to Joseph as a birthday gift. Alice stabs Polly in her eye with a shard of broken glass and uses the stairlift to drag her downstairs.

Edgar smashes through an upstairs ceiling, driving Joseph into the floor below. To escape Edgar, Alice barricades herself in a bathroom with Susan, who had been behaving normally since Edgar attacked their son. Susan screams at Alice for supposedly ruining their family. Alice shows a burn wound on her stomach, forcing Susan to face that Will abused her. Succumbing to possession again, Susan cruelly taunts Alice. A violent fight ensues. Alice escapes by mutilating Susan with a rotary saw.

Alice goes to the attic to search for the Kandarian dagger. Now possessed, Joseph crawls up to her. Alice stabs him with various blades until she finds the one that releases Joseph’s soul, causing the curse to recede and his dead body to collapse.

Susan and Edgar chase Alice onto the roof and down the chimney. Alice uses the rotary saw to decapitate Susan and split open Edgar’s head. She then sets fire to the house. Alice escapes outside where Max attacks her. Alice uses the Kandarian dagger to kill the deadite dog.

Will’s resurrected corpse emerges from the burning fire to taunt Alice. Alice flees through the surrounding forest to a construction site with Will in pursuit. Will’s subsequent attack causes Alice to fall into a pit where she impales her ankle on exposed rebar. The dagger begins sinking into tar that Will used to start flooding the pit. When Will goes to grab the blade, Alice takes the opportunity to retrieve a jackhammer she uses to destroy Will’s charred skeleton. Alice gets the dagger and stabs her deadite husband with it. Finally, she vindictively tears apart Will’s skull with her bare hands.

Clutching the dagger, Alice crawls away to approaching police cars. With dawn breaking, paramedics arrive to rescue Alice.

A mid-credits scene shows a passing driver stopping to help Polly as she crawls along the side of a road. Still possessed, Polly viciously attacks the would-be Samaritan.

In a post-credits scene, the crematorium manager shows her young daughter a shelf of unclaimed urns. Left alone, the little girl notes the remains of Christopher Leroy and Ellie Bixler. Deadite Ellie, last seen as a decapitated head kicked into crushing machinery, supernaturally manifests in the room to kill the little girl. Ellie declares, “Mommy’s back.”

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Review:

Every major horror release of 2026 had some sort of argumentative discourse making the rounds while the film was playing in theaters. For “Backrooms” (review here), there was a bit of a brouhaha about the director’s young age, creating a conspiratorial claim that Kane Parsons might have had help helming his first feature in an echo of that pesky “Poltergeist” rumor. With Curry Barker’s “Obsession” (review here), misinterpretations of the movie’s messaging led to some saying Bear’s behavior made him more of a misunderstood victim while others maintained it was clear he was never meant to be a blameless good guy.

On “Evil Dead Burn’s” turn, early complaints called out the film’s dark tone. Hubbub from those shocked by the visceral violence, gnarly gore, and heavy themes had it that the movie was too mean, too nasty, even depressingly nihilistic to fit in the “Evil Dead” universe. What those miffed mouths apparently forgot was that the franchise wasn’t always anchored on a live-action comic book hero swinging a chainsaw for an arm while confidently coughing out humorous one-liners and quipping, “Groovy!” Excessive exposure to “Army of Darkness” and the recency of “Ash vs. Evil Dead” seems to have some people misremembering the extremes of the original “The Evil Dead,” which did incorporate black comedy, but also infamously featured a sentient tree sexually assaulting a restrained woman.

Setting aside whether controversial content has a place in an “Evil Dead” entry, or if any outrage is pointless pearl-clutching, those calling out “Evil Dead Burn” for its callousness aren’t wrong about the movie being brutal, bleak, or grim and grisly. One early scene introduces two fishing friends playfully teasing each other. Another shows four friends at a club having a couple of laughs as they celebrate one of their birthdays. After those first few minutes though, you’ll never see anyone smile again, certainly not onscreen, and probably not in the audience either.

Aspiring writer Joseph Price shouldn’t have messed with his grandfather’s belongings. Going through handwritten journals, audio recordings, and extensive occult research on the Necronomicon, deadites, and a Kandarian dagger capable of banishing evil entities back to Hell is how a fresh round of demonic drama gets kicked up in the first place.

Joseph’s brother Will, meanwhile, shouldn’t have subjected his French wife Alice to chronic abuse throughout their troubled marriage. A public blowout at that aforementioned birthday party leads to Will driving off drunk, and straight into a head-on collision with an undead ghoul Joseph unknowingly resurrected.

The Price family can’t escape the curse now coming for them. Following Will’s funeral, his parents Susan and Edgar, Susan’s dementia-afflicted mother Polly, and Joseph and his girlfriend Thya host Alice at their family’s remote lakeside home for a moment of mourning that turns into a long night of supernatural terror. One by one, each person succumbs to possession, eventually leaving Alice as the last woman standing in a fierce fight for survival against fiendish forces determined to turn the lakehouse into a slaughterhouse.

In the case of “Evil Dead Burn,” the story serves to set up that slaughter more than it means to enrich the fiction with a deep narrative. The house turns into a chaotic meat grinder of bloody mayhem, and the movie becomes an endurance test engineered exclusively to forcefully pull physical reactions out of viewers held captive for the carnage. “Evil Dead Burn” wants you to squirm. It wants you to flinch. It wants you to continually close your eyes and claw at your seat cushion. That’s what the movie is, whether anyone likes it or not. Accordingly, some people will like director Sebastien Vanicek’s flair for splattery style while unimpressed eyes most definitely will not.

“Evil Dead Burn” is not for squeamish stomachs. It’s also not for anyone looking for “fun” frights, because the film goes hard on its specific brand of vicious horror. In addition to copious shots of punctured flesh and snapping bones, potentially triggering scenes include verbally cruel characters, animal harm, and an unkillable deadite who repeatedly simulates suicide by firing a handgun into his wickedly smiling face. Believe it or not, “Evil Dead Burn” slips in a few intentional gags for little lifts of relief, though just as intentionally, those moments are few and far between.

In pushing the R rating to the absolute limits of what that single letter will allow, Vanicek and his cowriter Florent Bernard clearly focused their creative discussions, likely while cackling, on ways to kill, mutilate, and painfully maim everyone in the most visually messed up ways they could imagine. “Evil Dead Burn” gets gross in other ways too, such as having a deadite lick goopy dentures freshly removed from an old woman’s wet mouth.

Three out of four stars is a solid score for the high mark “Evil Dead Burn” hits on the gruesomeness strength-o-meter hammered with all the movie’s might. It’s not a universal rating reflective of everyone’s average reaction to the film. Add one more star or subtract up to two depending on how one’s tongue takes to the taste of the tone’s merciless assault on the senses. That assault can be a lot to manage, not necessarily because of the consistently high intensity of the action, but because that’s a huge heap of relentless death and destruction to sustain a runtime ten minutes short of two hours.

Circling back to the earlier question that caused some conflict among fans, what does make an “Evil Dead” movie an “Evil Dead” movie now that Bruce Campbell’s Ash is no longer in the mix? Someone could contend that if its deadites went by a different name, and if the loose links to “Evil Dead Rise” (review here) were removed, they might make a case that “Burn” wouldn’t look like “Evil Dead” at all. Alternatively, that same person could ignore any hangups regarding how well “Evil Dead Burn” works with what’s come before and simply surf the film’s turbulent wave for the scorching experience it sears into a viewer’s eye sockets.

NOTE: There is a mid-credits scene and a post-credits scene.

Review Score: 70

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