Fans have been forced to wait a little longer for the arrival of Evil Dead Rise than first expected, but director Lee Cronin is helping pass the time by sharing more details about the upcoming sequel. This has included a new eerie image showing one of the movie's characters hovering over a lake. You can check out the new image below.
After years of being centered on a cabin in the woods and being led by Bruce Campbell, who even had a post-credit cameo in the reboot of the franchise several years ago, Evil Dead Rise is about to break all the rules and bring the Evil Dead to a new location and without its talismanic leading man. In the latest edition of Total Film, Cronin revealed:
"There’s no Ash in this story and there’s no cabin in the woods, and they’re two iconic elements of what Evil Dead is. But the movie does include the book and an extraordinary amount of vicious, malevolent Deadites, so I was always pretty comfortable making that move [to LA].
It still needed to maintain some of the claustrophobia and that translated really well from the cabin into an urban environment. This is about a family in a rundown building stuck in their apartment, so it follows the same rhythm but puts it in a more contemporary space.
It’s firmly in the universe. There’s a lot of fun callbacks, and there are direct lines to the past. But part of the goal of making this movie was to create something that could expand the Evil Dead universe further."
Bruce Campbell Is Still Very Much Part of the Evil Dead Franchise
Even though Bruce Campbell has said he has hung up his chainsaw and played Ash Williams for the last time, the icon is still producing the new movie and has been very involved in the franchise's legacy. Speaking earlier this year, Campbell prepared fans for a real ride when Evil Dead Rise is finally released. He said:
“It’s a house of fire is what it is. It’s going to scare the living crap out of you. It’s urban, no cabin in the woods. An urban high-rise apartment is the cabin. It’s a single mom and her family and it’s going to be some bad juju happening there. It’s going to be horrible, but in the best way. The trick it to try and keep something of the Evil Dead legacy within the filmmaking, so I was there for the post production sound that we did in Europe. So we snuck in a few of the original Evil Dead sound effects from the original movie, because we have them all digital now. So my job is to sneak stuff in and infect his movie with some of the Evil Dead stuff. My voice is in it too.”
Evil Dead Rise was initially set to be released as an HBO Max exclusive, but between impressive test screenings and a change of direction at Warner Bros. Discovery, the film was granted a theatrical release. Even though that means a bit of a wait for fans, seeing a new Evil Dead movie on the big screen will surely be worth it. Evil Dead Rise now releases on April 21, 2023.