Evil Dead Rise Director Breaks Down Bringing the New Sequel to Life

After his film The Hole in the Ground won over the independent horror crowd, filmmaker Lee Cronin next set his sights on a highly coveted series, as Sam Raimi selected him to write and direct the latest entry in the Evil Dead franchise. Back in 2013, fans were already given a more straightforward revival of the concept of the original by director Fede Álvarez, with one of Cronin’s biggest deviations from the franchise’s predecessors being to set his Evil Dead Rise in a dilapidated apartment building in a city as opposed to a remote cabin in the woods. Evil Dead Rise is in theaters now.

Despite the setting of the new film being different, one standard of the series that Cronin kept to was the copious amounts of blood being shed in all manner of ways.

“I think it’s about how you use it, it’s not about how much you use,” Cronin shared with ComicBook.com of his approach to on-screen violence. “I do think it’s about how you use it. I wanted the blood to be a character in the movie and to almost have a strange beauty even though it’s everywhere. So in a way, I show a certain amount of restraint with the gore and it builds and builds until you get this tidal wave at one point in the story and then everything is turned red from there on out. It’s a little bit about that, the ballet of how I wanted all of that to play out. It’s less about the blood that you see on screen. For me, it’s more about how long you hold on a moment of impact or injury or something like that. I never wanted this movie to cross the line into it feeling like it would be akin to torture porn because I wanted it to be over-the-top and as I said, operatic, but also to be entertaining.”

He continued, “I think when you look at a lot of the kill moments, yes, I labor on certain things, but I do it in this way where you’re constantly refreshed. So if you take the moment that audiences really love with Stephanie, the Stephanie attack scene, when that takes place, you actually linger on a lot of those moments. But each shot is a new phase of it. It’s not just twisting the knife in and holding for fun and cutting to more screaming. And that, to me, is the thing, when you’re just laboring on that one vicious moment and trying to milk it until it becomes something that’s actually distasteful, which is fine. That’s a tonal choice, but that’s not the tone I wanted for this film.”

In the fifth Evil Dead film, a road-weary Beth pays an overdue visit to her older sister Ellie, who is raising three kids on her own in a cramped L.A. apartment. The sisters’ reunion is cut short by the discovery of a mysterious book deep in the bowels of Ellie’s building, giving rise to flesh-possessing demons, and thrusting Beth into a primal battle for survival as she is faced with the most nightmarish version of motherhood imaginable.

Even if a majority of the film takes place in an apartment building, the opening sequence does depict events unfolding in a more secluded locale, with Cronin detailing the process of crafting that introductory sequence. 

“I knew that before I even wrote, ‘Fade in,’ that was decided in my mind within the short document process developing the movie, and where it came from is I wanted to give the audience a blast of horror,” the filmmaker expressed. “I like a cold open that illustrates or gives you a taste of what is to come, but I didn’t want it to be obvious … I just wanted to do something that just was like, ‘Here we are.’ You don’t really have time. It’s like, I want to get your attention right away, which is why I remember thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if the opening shot of the film was the force?’ And then obviously I subvert what that force is in a way.”

He added, “And then the other thing as well is I’d made the choice and I knew the franchise needed to move somewhere. I think with people’s reactions, it was proven to be the right choice, was to take it to the city and have a different set of characters with family and all of that. But I also, being a massive fan, was like, ‘Goddammit, I want to shoot something in the forest at the cabin,’ and this was my way to actually have my cake and eat it, too.”

Speaking to that development process, Cronin realized that it was one thing to write a brutal attack and another to actually bring it to life on set.

“I think what was really interesting, was that because there’s a lot of what I call visual refreshment in the film, and I never replicate a shot or I tried to not repeat myself. It’s always something new and there’s a new angle,” Cronin admitted. “So whenever it came to any of the ideas that I had when I was writing whatever impalement or stabbing or attack, I always looked to try and glean as much as I could from that creatively. So even things like a knife goes in, but then we have the moment where the knife comes out, and so each one of those required a different solution. That was the interesting thing for me. Even something as basic as when [someone] gets stabbed in the hand, that required three or four different types of rigs for the different angles and the approaches; the in, the out, all of those moments.”

He added, “That was really eye-opening to me that there was no one-size-fits-all solution to these moments of attack or brutality or these crazy moments of violence in the film … And at some point in time down the line, I’ll release little bits of behind-the-scenes video, so people can see how we achieve those things. But that’s a beautiful example of every single new angle, in that it needed a new technical approach, a new rig and a new way of pumping blood and a new way of the actor having to actually interact with the technical. So that was a really, really enjoyable one for me.”

As opposed to other films that feature demons and the living undead, there aren’t entirely “rules” by which these ghouls have to adhere to, with Cronin detailing his method for passing supernatural entities from one victim to another.

“To me, it’s all about intent, and this is the thing that I love about Evil Dead, is that the power of somebody that’s possessed, even if you just look at Ellie as the apex of that, the first person taken out in this world, they have the power to just … As she shows with the neighbors, they have the power to just end it all,” Cronin admitted. “But the joy of the Deadites that separates them from, say, a zombie, is the actual pleasure they take in playing the game. So in a way, they have their own narrative working out at all times. To me, it is actually about the intent.”

Evil Dead Rise is in theaters now.

What did you think of the film? Let us know in the comments or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!