Evil Dead Burn Review: ★★★½☆ (3.5/5)
Sébastien Vaniček’s horror sequel delivers extreme gore and strong performances but struggles to create genuine scares. Souheila Yacoub impresses in a brutal family horror story that overwhelms audiences with violence while forgetting emotional stakes.
Rating: ★★★½☆ (3.5/5)
Director: Sébastien Vaniček
Release: July 10, 2026
Language: English
Cast: Souheila Yacoub, George Pullar, Hunter Doohan, Tandi Wright, Erroll Shand, Luciane Buchanan
Here is the thing about the Evil Dead franchise. It was never really about how much blood could be put on screen. The original was terrifying. Army of Darkness was deranged and hilarious. The 2013 remake pushed the gore further but kept you genuinely unsettled.
Evil Dead Rise in 2023 brought the demons home and made you feel something beyond disgust. Each film understood that shock and spectacle work best when they are grounded in something — a character you care about, a situation with genuine stakes, or at minimum a sense of mischief that makes the absurdity fun.
Evil Dead Burn has enormous amounts of blood. It has creative weaponry, spectacular violence, and more fluid spraying from human bodies than most films manage in an entire franchise. What it does not have nearly enough of is fun.
The story picks up in the aftermath of Evil Dead Rise, with the demonic forces now loose and spreading. Alice, played by Souheila Yacoub, is married into a deeply dysfunctional family. Her husband Will is verbally and physically abusive. His parents despise her.
His brother Joseph, played by Hunter Doohan, is sympathetic but too passive to actually help. When Will dies early in the film and the family gathers at their remote lakeside home, the deadites — ancient demonic spirits that possess human bodies — begin working their way through the family one by one.
The setup is genuinely interesting on paper. A woman who has been fighting emotional abuse long before the supernatural horror arrives, surrounded by a family that has already made her feel unwelcome. The idea that the deadites feed on existing trauma and unhealed wounds is a smart one, and there are flashes of a more psychologically complex film underneath all the carnage.
Souheila Yacoub does her best with the material available, bringing real emotional weight to Alice’s exhausting situation. Tandi Wright as the mother-in-law Susan gives the film’s most layered human performance — a woman whose grief you almost sympathise with until you understand what she has been complicit in. Hunter Doohan is convincing as the well-meaning but ineffective brother. The performances are not the problem.
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The problem is that after the first killing, the film never stops. Bodies pile up. Heads roll. Eyes are pierced. A car headrest becomes a weapon. Kitchen implements are repurposed in ways that will haunt anyone who thinks about it for more than a moment.
Each sequence is technically accomplished and each one is more extreme than the last. And somewhere around the midpoint, something strange happens — you stop feeling anything.
That numbing effect is the film’s most significant failure. Horror movies are supposed to make you feel something, whether that is fear, revulsion, dread, or even the peculiar pleasure of being scared in a safe environment. Evil Dead Burn is so committed to escalation that it forgets to vary its emotional register. Every scene operates at the same pitch of maximum violence, and after a while maximum becomes the new normal.
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The colour palette is deliberately washed-out and grim, which makes even the genuinely inventive sequences feel visually oppressive rather than exciting. The ending — Alice’s eye colour shifting as she walks away from the carnage — hints at more to come and suggests that whoever inherits the next instalment has real story material to work with if they choose to use it.
Evil Dead Burn is not a bad film by the standards of pure gore cinema. As a horror experience, though, it mistakes quantity for intensity and loses what made this franchise worth caring about.
Evil Dead Burn is now playing in cinemas.