Evil Dead Star Bruce Campbell Says New Sequel Is “Excruciating” and “Dark”

Whether it be in movies, TV, or video games, the Evil Dead franchise has never shied away from delivering audiences brutal and bloody violence, though longtime star and producer of the upcoming Evil Dead Rise Bruce Campbell recently hinted at the new installment taking things to new heights. He did point out, however, that rather than necessarily being visually gruesome, all of the characters in the new film are related to one another, which ultimately makes the experience “much more excruciating” from an emotional level. The new Evil Dead Rise is expected to land on HBO Max sometime next year.

“This one’s dark, this one’s pretty serious. Good, strong performances,” Bruce Campbell detailed to BlairWitch.De. “It’s a single mom who now has to deal with this book. These days it’s more about the book. That book gets around, that book is handed around, passed along, people try and get rid of it, they try to bury it or destroy it and they really can’t. So this book just keeps popping up, so really it’s just another story of what happens if this book appears in this particular group of people’s lives and how it intersects.”

He added, “Lee Cronin is a very serious man, he’s a very serious director. Sam Raimi picked him because he did a pretty good job on a movie A Hole in the Ground. He’s a very atmospheric director and Sam thought, ‘Let’s give this guy a shot.’ It’s gonna be really good, we’ve seen a rough [cut] of it already and it has all the components we need. Like anything, when you see a rough version it just has to be tightened, but we’re good. We’re in good shape.”

Fans have been given a number of teases about the plot of the new sequel, which includes confirmation that it won’t be unfolding in another remote cabin, as Campbell described how the terror of the Necronomicon descends on a family to confirm how this premise makes things “much more excruciating.” The producer also noted how, while Cronin had a lot of freedom with the picture, there’s still a lot of familiar elements that he embraced.

“We let [filmmakers] have a lot of creative leeway, but the basics stay the same. The book, the possession, the rules of how you get rid of them,” Campbell confirmed. “Every new heroine or hero has to learn how to dispel the evil because, it’s one thing to conjure it,there are certain ways you conjure it, and there are certain ways you get rid of it. And not everybody figures that out easily. This family is not the same at the end of the movie. They’re gutted, the whole family’s destroyed. These people get possessed; brothers, sisters, sons, daughters. This one’s a family affair. They’re all related in this one. I think that makes the possession and, killing your siblings, things like that, even harder. Because in the original Evil Dead, there was one brother-sister combo, Ash and his sister Cheryl. The rest were just friends. Now, they’re all related in this household.”

Stay tuned for details on Evil Dead Rise.

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