Evil Dead Rise

DIRECTOR LEE CRONIN ON THE SURPRISES OF HIS DEADITE-DRENCHED SEQUEL

LEE CRONIN’S EVIL Dead Rise, a sequel to Sam Raimi’s classic horror trilogy, is not only one of the best films in that franchise, but its most successful, with $150 million and counting at the global box office. Evil Dead rise, indeed. Here, he tells us about the standout moments and obscure Easter eggs from his ultra-violent ode to the ultimate experience in gruelling terror.

STONE-COLD OPEN

Cronin’s film may be set in a Los Angeles apartment block, but it starts out in a familiar setting, a cabin in the woods, in which possessed Jessica (Anna-maree Thomas) goes on a Deadite rampage. Cronin announces Jessica’s new status by having her read aloud from Wuthering Heights. “I actually had scripted A Farewell To Arms, and had found the perfect passages,” says Cronin. That would have been a nod to the Ernest Hemingway novel which makes a handy cameo in Evil Dead II. “But we had rights issues. What I was looking for was something classical, but that also had this almost horrific tone to the passages.” The close-ups of the text are the only 100 per cent digital shots in the movie.

TITLE DEED

That cold open ends with Jessica, now fully Deadite, rising from a lake while the screen behind her fills with the film’s title, and the soundtrack shrieks as if the gates of hell themselves have opened. It’s one heck of a title-card reveal. “That was challenging,” admits Cronin. “That water was cold.” Cronin composed the shot specifically for the title card. “I knew the kind of space in the frame I wanted. We knew where we were putting the camera.”

BRUCE CAMPB-EO

The evil force is awakened here by a vinyl recording left by three unfortunate priests, circa 1923, which is found in the bowels of an L.A. apartment block by Danny (Morgan Davies), eldest son of Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland). The main voice on the record (that of Father Marcus Littleton) belongs to Mark Mitchinson, who also plays Mr. Fonda, but the keen-eared will recognise a voice cameo from Bruce Campbell, aka Evil Dead’s legendary hero Ash, who bursts in to warn the priests of the eldritch horrors lurking within the pages of the book. Cronin was the one who shouted the line out on set for Davies to react to, but he recruited Campbell (also an executive producer) to come to Dublin to record it. “That was in the screenplay,” Cronin says. “I wasn’t making it up later on.” As for whether that line is Campbell playing Ash again, somehow, that’s up to the audience to decide.

EVIL EASTER EGG

Of all the Easter eggs built into the movie (a pizza company called Henrietta’s, a nod to the main Deadite villain in Evil Dead II; a chainsaw the same shade of yellow as Raimi’s beloved Delta Oldsmobile 88 car), Cronin has a favourite that few, if any, have spotted. It comes when Ellie — now completely in the clutches of darkness —peeks around a doorway. “I framed the angle of her face to look exactly like the Evil Dead II cover artwork,” he laughs. “It was take 16 and I’m like, ‘Yeah, you’re coming out too far. It should be this much of the face, and your eyes should be angled that way.’ That was one I was really precious about.” The kicker: that shot isn’t actually in Evil Dead II — it exists purely on the DVD cover.

BAD NEIGHBOUR

Leaving aside Army Of Darkness, which dispenses with a horde of cackling skeletons (but are they really alive? If not, do they count as deaths?), Evil Dead Rise has the highest body count of any Evil Dead flick, with almost half of those coming in one frenzied sequence as Ellie is locked out of the apartment and massacres every single one of her neighbours. No more borrowed sugar for them. The whole thing is seen through the apartment door’s spy-hole, and was captured in one take. “It’s what I call a restricted-view setpiece,” says Cronin, who had a similar moment in his debut film, The Hole In The Ground. “This being Evil Dead, I wanted it to be really visceral. It was a joyous day. So when Ellie walks in and gets blown away, we set off a flashlight with sparks, there’d be rubber mats on the floor so people could land and then they’d be pulled away so someone else could walk in. It was a piece of technical ballet.” Totally nutcrackers.

MEET STAFFANIE

Showing no mercy, Cronin quickly has Ellie’s eldest daughter Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) possessed by the evil and, after eating some glass, try to kill her siblings. Only to be stopped, abruptly, when Kassie (Nell Fisher), Ellie’s youngest daughter, stabs her through the mouth with a creation she has dubbed ‘Staffanie’. “That was kindly handed to me by my niece Georgia,” he laughs. “A mop had broken and she’d got a doll’s head and stuck it on top. The Staffanie we made in the movie is pretty much exactly what she created.” Cronin loves it so much that he has a crude tattoo on his arm showing the moment of impact. “That was the end of my journey with that movie. That was my treat.”

666 RPM

“I was writing an Evil Dead movie, and you reach a point where you really start to play around with nightmare logic,” says Cronin. “The rules are malleable.” Take, for instance, the inspired moment when Ellie sneaks back into the apartment and plays aloud a demonic vinyl recording simply by placing her fingernail on the record and blaring the sound out of her open mouth. “I was messing around with vinyl — I have a bunch of old 78 records that were in my family — and then I went back and planted these little breadcrumbs. You can see Ellie’s broken fingernail when she’s dead in her bed.” Groovy.

THE L.A. CHAIN SAW MASSACRE

One Evil Dead staple Cronin decided he could not do without was a scene where his hero runs amok with a chainsaw, and sure enough, towards the end, his hero, Lily Sullivan’s Beth, goes gaga with one she finds in the building’s basement. It features in the film’s most memorable shot, a frenzied close-up in which Beth races across the parking garage while the camera lurches to and fro. Turns out this is because Cronin essentially bound the camera to Sullivan. “I tempted her with a Happy Meal,” says Cronin, “and I was like, ‘How about we just strap the camera to you and go for it?’” Raimi would be proud.

EVIL DEAD RISE IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY, 4K AND DIGITAL