Blood, Baggage, and Deadites: Why Evil Dead Burn Didn’t Click for This Lifelong Fan

🚨 SPOILER ALERT: Major plot points, specific character deaths, and heavy narrative spoilers for Sébastien Vaniček's Evil Dead Burn (2026) discussed below! 🚨

​First things first: hats off to director Sébastien Vaniček. The man absolutely knows how to shoot a movie, and the horror community has clearly shown him some love—Evil Dead Burn is currently sitting at an 82% on Rotten Tomatoes. Horror is completely subjective; everyone looks at it through a different lens, and it’s awesome that it’s finding its crowd. Maybe the folks giving it rave reviews are the same crowd that thought Hereditary was a flawless masterpiece. Personally? Hereditary didn't click for me, and after walking out of the theater, Evil Dead Burn didn't either.

​But please, don't drag me for my take! That's the beauty of being a horror fan. For instance, I heard plenty of people say they didn't like Ryan Coogler's 2025 film Sinners, but I happened to absolutely love it—I thought it was a total breath of fresh air, something completely different and unique that hadn't been done. We can disagree on the execution of these films but still share a mutual, deep love for the genre.

​As a lifelong horror fan and a writer who crafts visceral, gory scenes myself, I’ve been following this franchise since I was a little kid. I still remember the raw, isolated terror of Sam Raimi’s original 1981 masterpiece The Evil Dead—the overwhelming dread of the woods, the trees, and that terrifying chicken in the basement.

​I’ve stuck with the franchise through thick and thin. I absolutely adored Fede Álvarez's 2013 Evil Dead reboot. That film was unbelievably good and featured one of the greatest tributes in horror history: when Mia has her arm pinned under an overturned Jeep in the pouring rain, and she literally has to rip her own arm off to survive. That raw, agonizing moment was an incredible, bloody nod to Ash losing his hand in Evil Dead II.

​And then we had the high-tension, claustrophobic apartment nightmare of Evil Dead Rise (2023), which managed to make an urban high-rise building feel just as terrifyingly isolated as a cabin in the woods.

(By the way—if you haven't seen Evil Dead Rise yet, or want to rewatch a modern masterpiece, it is currently streaming on Paramount+!)

​But Evil Dead Burn? It felt less like a supernatural roller coaster and more like a grueling, twisted family therapy session gone horribly wrong.

​The Plot Holes and the Broken Lore. But it did have some god ump sares i will give it that.

​Beyond the overwhelming family drama, the movie left me scratching my head on basic franchise lore. In the classic Evil Dead universe, the ancient evil isn't just hanging out—it has to be unleashed by reading the incantations from the Book of the Dead (Necronomicon Ex-Mortis). In Burn, Alice explicitly stops herself on the fourth word, saying she isn't doing it. Yet, the possession spreads anyway from the funeral home onward. If you don't even have to read the words to unleash the spirit anymore, it completely breaks the established rules of the universe and leaves a massive plot hole.

​Because of that, the extreme gore (including a deeply unsettling dentures sequence and a head being caved in with a metal dishwasher door) felt like it was doing all the heavy lifting to plaster over a confusing script. For me, it wasn’t a Terrifier movie—it's Evil Dead, and there's a huge difference. They crossed a line with the family dog, too. Watching Edgar kill Max the German Shepherd didn't make the movie scarier; it just broke my heart. It feels like a cheap, miserable trick to force an emotional reaction out of the audience.

​The Saving Graces: Stellar Imagery and Great lines

​Before stepping down from my soapbox, I have to give massive credit to the film's spectacular aesthetic. The scenery and the house itself are absolutely gorgeous. Honestly, for anyone who knows the area, this house looked exactly like it was sitting right down the street from the Hollow at Black Creek. The structural vibe, the eerie isolation, and the haunting surrounding woods could have easily made it a neighboring house. The imagery was hands-down beautiful. I also have to give a funny nod to Grandma Polly—even with her dementia, her character brought some brilliant, dark, comedic timing to an otherwise miserable household.

​The script also features two of the sharpest, most jaw-droppingly self-aware confrontations I’ve seen in horror recently.

​The first is the tragic, twisted payoff between Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and his girlfriend, Thya (Luciane Buchanan). Early in the film, Joseph’s newly possessed father, Edgar, brutally attacks Thya in the car. As Edgar chokes her, Thya screams for Joseph to use the gun. Edgar even aggressively presses his head against the barrel, daring his son to do it. But Joseph freezes—the ultimate wimp—unable to pull the trigger on his dad. He flees, leaving Thya to be murdered and subsequently possessed.

​Later, when a fully possessed Thya corners Joseph in the kitchen, knocking him backward into the open dishwasher and pinning him directly over a tray of sharp, exposed knives, he finally finds his survival instinct. He grabs a corkscrew and drives it deep into her neck. Knowing Deadites can't truly be stopped unless they are entirely dismembered, Thya looks down at him, completely reading his cowardice to filth with the exact quote:

​"Oh, you couldn't shoot your dad. You couldn't kill your dad. But you can kill me."

​It was a chilling, brilliant call-out of his character.

​The second—and arguably best—climax of the film belongs to Alice (Souheila Yacoub). Throughout the movie, we learn about the immense physical and emotional abuse she suffered from her late husband, William (George Pullar), whose toxic family openly enabled his behavior and blamed her for it. William warns her early on that their vows mean they will be together even after death.

​When a Deadite-possessed William finally stalks out of the house completely engulfed in flames, he plays the classic abuser card one last time. The demonic energy drops just enough for him to feign turning back into his normal, vulnerable self. Alice steps forward, caresses his face, and smiles—and for a split second, you think she’s going to fall for his manipulation. Instead, she firmly drives the Kandarian dagger—the one weapon capable of truly destroying them—straight into his neck. When he whimpers, "I love you," Alice delivers the ultimate, empowering shutdown:

​"That's not enough."

​Final Thoughts

​Evil Dead Burn has plenty of teeth, and Alice’s final stand showed that there was a powerful story hidden deep inside the script. But for me, it traded classic supernatural dread for pure trauma-dumping. I’m glad I didn't have to pay for a ticket to see this one, but it doesn't change my love for the franchise. I'm still going to be first in line to watch the next Evil Dead movie that comes out, because a true horror fan stays loyal through the good and the bad.

​But hey, that's just my personal opinion!

​What did you think of Evil Dead Burn? If you've seen it, drop me a comment and let me know how you feel. Did the family drama work for you, or did the broken lore drive you crazy too? Let’s talk below