THE URBAN HORRORS OF EVIL DEAD RISE

Dead by rent day, dead by rent day!

Few franchises are as closely associated with a specific location as the Evil Dead series. While Army of Darkness (1992) transported us to a medieval court and Ash vs. Evil Dead (2015-2018) expanded the universe significantly, the franchise still exists in the minds of many as quintessential “cabin in the woods” horror. It was a risk for Evil Dead Rise (2024) to forgo that familiar setting (for the most part). But in doing so, it opens the door to an urban jungle of new nightmares.

After an opening that pays homage to the franchise’s cabin-based roots, Evil Dead Rise shifts the action to a high-rise apartment building in Los Angeles. Establishing shots of the crumbling building towering over the rain-slicked streets set the tone for the bleak (very bleak!) story about to unfold. Where previous Evil Dead films have shown us the cabin and the surrounding woods in somewhat more idealized states before the Kandarian evil is unleashed and corrupts them, Evil Dead Rise offers no such contrast. The building is about to be torn down, leaving Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) and her children with nowhere to go. Their home is condemned, and so are they. 

The family’s apartment, like many apartments, is cozy only by virtue of the people occupying it. As family members begin to succumb to Kandarian influence, the space loses what little heart it had and becomes little more than a box containing furniture to be thrown against and kitchen equipment to be ingested and/or wielded. The bathroom, with its yellow wallpaper and green tiles, once the site of a cute conversation between Ellie’s sister Beth (Lily Sullivan) and her niece Kassie (Nell Fisher), suddenly looks drab and sickly as possessed Ellie is dumped in the bathtub. The bedroom where the kids slept becomes the would-be final resting place for a corpse. 

But this transformation starts before the Book of the Dead is opened. Ellie is starting to pack. The apartment is revealed to have never been a home, merely a space that the family occupied temporarily, transactionally, like a glorified hotel. It’s a realization a lot of us city folks have to come to terms with when our landlords hike the rent or turf us out unexpectedly. The demons might as well be new tenants making a mockery of the life the family once led there.

When the mayhem truly ramps up to an eleven, writer-director Lee Cronin takes advantage of the unique constraints of apartment living. In a suburban home, characters are free to flee up staircases, escape onto rooftops, sprint across sprawling lawns. Even in a cabin in the woods, folks can usually run outside, although they’d better watch out for possessed trees.

No such escape routes present themselves in the average apartment, where a chase will be over faster than you can “cheese grater to the leg.” With the elevator acting up, the staircase out of commission, and the only fire escape inaccessible, there’s nothing for the survivors to do except hope the deadbolt holds and the evil stays on the other side of the peephole (spoilers: it doesn’t). 

Cronin could have gotten even more mileage out of his location if he’d opened up more spaces within the building to demonic dalliances. It’s not hard to imagine another version of Evil Dead Rise that takes a cue from REC (2007), with characters sprinting up and down winding staircases as Deadites pop out of every apartment and fling survivors over the railings. 

With filming taking place in New Zealand in the midst of a global pandemic, however, introducing more characters into the mix may have been impossible. Instead, the filmmaker leaned into the unique isolation that can come from apartment living — an isolation that many people were likely experiencing as the film was being shot. 

At a cabin in the woods, you know your chances of rescue are slim because no one is around for miles. But when you’re living on top of one another, the distance between you is a social one, even if Ellie and her children seem to interact with the neighbors on their floor far more than I do with mine (our interactions are limited to terse words through a half-open door when they play the drums at 2 a.m. on a weeknight).

But their floor might as well be its own world. A neighbor just a few floors down has no idea about the carnage taking place above her head until she encounters the bloody aftermath in the parking garage. She’s been planning a weekend getaway while her upstairs neighbors were shrieking for help. 

Those shrieks were always doomed to fall on deaf ears. Early into Evil Dead Rise, Beth screams out the window in an attempt to draw help. Her cries are drowned out by the rain — but in a city where residents learn to tune out the constant noise, they might well have gone unheard regardless. A similar moment took place in this year’s Scream VI, another franchise film taking a stab at a big-city setting, with the agonized screams from the opening kill blending in with the delighted cries of nearby bar hoppers. Space isn’t the only place where nobody hears you scream. The loneliness that sometimes comes from being surrounded by other people can be just as suffocating. 

This hopeless moment in Evil Dead Rise is a perfect encapsulation of where the film’s true horror and nihilism come from. Ellie has been trying to call Beth for some time, desperate for help and comfort as her relationship falls apart and her home is snatched away from her. Her calls went unanswered. An earthquake and incantation may have trapped them on the top floor of their high rise with evil oozing from every crack in the walls, but their isolation began long before that. 

They weren’t about to escape any time soon.