Entertainment
New Evil Dead Trailer Doesn't Care About Continuity
By Jennifer Asencio
| Published
There is a new Evil Dead movie coming out this summer, this one called Evil Dead: Burn. It is the sixth movie in the franchise, and a few trailers for it dropped on May 5, 2026.
The trailers heavily feature a fatal car accident and funeral for a character named Will, played by George Pullar. He seems to have a wife, teenaged children, and other family members who are grieving for him. The rest of the family harks out to a cabin in the woods, where the nefarious Necronomicon makes its appearance and is far too tempting not to read. What results is a mayhem of murderous hillbillies, and family and friends turned by the book into Kandarian demons that slaughter their way through the living with impunity.
The Evolution Of Evil Dead
The original Evil Dead was about a group of five college students who stayed in a cabin in the middle of the woods, one which happened to belong to an archaeology professor who retreated there to study his latest find: the Necronomicon. Of the group, only one survives: Ash (the iconic Bruce Campbell), bumbling, wisecracking, and full of ingenuity and contemporary know-how. Once Ash recovers from the initial shock of all his friends being turned into Deadites by the Necronomicon’s magic, he slashes and shoots his way through three movies and a three-season series.
2013’s Evil Dead, directed by Fede Alvarez, returned to the seriousness of the first movie with a new version of the Necronomicon that got read by five more curious students, this time on retreat to help Mia (Jane Levy) withdraw from drug addiction. While this version did return the story to the cabin in the woods, it also introduced elevated horror to the Evil Dead franchise.
Evil Dead, Elevated?
Elevated horror is horror that represents some other struggle. For example, there is elevated horror about childhood trauma, mental illness, LGBQT issues, and suicide. Rather than being a simple horror story, elevated horror emphasizes its social point, with the horror as a mere allegory for it. In Evil Dead (2013), the message was about drug addiction.
Lee Cronin added his own layer of elevated horror to Evil Dead: Rise, which came out in 2023 and followed two sisters: a drifter and a single mom with three children. Removing itself from the cabin in the woods, this one took place in a high rise in Los Angeles and turned mom Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) into a Deadite early so she could terrorize her neighbors, her children, and her sister Beth (Lily Sullivan). Cronin’s other movies, The Hole in the Ground and the recent theatrical release, The Mummy, also focus on parenthood and protection of children, a theme he could not resist integrating into his take on the Kandarian demon franchise.
Ressurection With Intention
Evil Dead: Burn looks like it is doing the same: keeping the Deadites and the Necronomicon, but also keeping “the message,” this time a theme of grieving loss. Rather than reading the Necronomicon out of accident or misplaced curiosity, Luciane Buchannan’s heroine, named Thya, reads from it in the hopes that it would resurrect a dead loved one. The hillbillies that figured vaguely into the first movie and more definitively in the 2013 version seem to also be making a comeback, but are part of the problem, not the solution.
As a long-time fan of the Evil Dead series, some of the permutations that have been introduced to the continuity, like the hillbilly witch in the 2013 film, or the Necronomicon being read on audio rather than aloud, do add interesting new angles to the epic of the Kandarian demons. But I can’t help but feel that each new movie that doesn’t include Ash is merely using the Kandarian demons to spread whatever “elevated horror” message that particular director intends.
Ash’s Absence
Ash was fun: taking a beating, being tortured by a demon inhabiting his girlfriend, traveling back in time, leading the charge against an entire army of the dead, and finally settling into a career in retail, only to start the whole cycle again in an intoxicated stupor. He was too bumbling to be taken seriously while simultaneously being the hero we need rather than the hero we want. He’s got wisecracks and memorable one-liners and is an action hero alongside being a horror movie survivor.
Subsequent Evil Dead movies have been so interested in being elevated horror that they forgot that Evil Dead is supposed to be fun. Alvarez and Cronin had reputations as horror directors to protect and didn’t take some of the more comedic risks that creator Sam Raimi pioneered. They focus on what’s gory and scary about Kandarian demons without giving us a new hero to root for, which removes half of what made the original Evil Dead movies what they were.
Unaddressed Loose Ends
Furthermore, previous installments left loose ends in the form of Mia from the 2013 film, and Beth and Kassie from Evil Dead: Rise; the Rise epilogue also features new young people in a cabin in the woods but never establishes what happened to them. These stories are so disparate that their characters are forgettable and don’t seem like part of the continuity.
Evil Dead has become an anthology as new movies continue to be made, which shouldn’t be a bad thing (especially as Bruce Campbell is too old to play Ash), but it has strayed too far in tone from the original work. Each new movie is following its own individual storyline, making them Evil Dead in name only.
Evil Dead: Burn comes out in theaters on July 10, 2026. What will happen when the Necronomicon is unleashed?