Publication Date: 07-14-2026

Evil Dead Burn (2026) review

Dir. Sébastien Vaniček

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★½

To quote the line from the Family Guy parody of the old in-theater advertising jingle “Let’s All Go to the Lobby,” “this place used to be fun.”

That place is Evil Dead, and the fun is long gone. Evil Dead Burn, the follow-up to Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, sucks any shred of joy that remained in the series. It’s so far removed from the absurdist splatter humor of Sam Raimi’s series that it might as well have just been called “Burn.” At least then, it would’ve been spared any comparisons to the previous five films, all solid in their own ways. Horror fans more than any other fanbase can shake off a lame genre film like no other. Trying to remove the clear and present stain on a legacy franchise is as difficult as defining what the hell a Deadite even is anymore.

The film opens at a night-club, where a group of friends and their spouses are celebrating the birthday of Will (George Pullar), an abusive cad, whose night ends with him throwing a tantrum over a lackluster gift from his wife, speeding off into the distance, and crashing into a Deadite.

Will’s brother, Joseph (Hunter Doohan), attended the party that night, and as fate would have it, their grandfather was a researcher into Deadites, discovering in his findings that the undead creatures can be killed with a magic dagger. Joseph is confident that the very presence of the dagger could make them a target for Deadites in order to destroy them. Thoughtlessly, he puts the lives of his father Edgar (Errol Shand), mother Susan (Tandi Wright), sister-in-law/Will’s surviving wife Alice (Souheila Yacoub), and grandmother Polly (Maude Davey) at risk by summoning them to their home for revenge to be exacted through every means possible, including a dishwasher and every accessory a modern feel possesses, just to name a few.

With Cronin simply serving as a producer on the film — likely so he could work on his Mummy adaptation — Evil Dead Burn is directed by Sébastien Vaniček, who evidently must be allergic to color. Borrowing from New French Extremity horror ala Martyrs, Vaniček and cinematographer Philip Lozano wash out any and all color from the picture, capturing everything in shades of gray so drab, they even dull the color of the blood. It mutes any sort of visual personality, and before you argue that the original Evil Dead was a visually dark film, the shoestring budget and cabin setting at least gifted it some aesthetic personality. This thing is a sore for sight eyes.

Maybe this wouldn’t be such a problem if the editing weren’t so sloppy. Maxime Caro’s flash-cuts combined with Vaniček’s perplexing camera angles render Evil Dead Burn a messy symphony of carnage and chaos that fails to inspire. One of the most important aspects of any movie is being able to see what is unfolding, and the sixth installment in this series can’t even be trusted to do that thanks to a myriad of frustrating creative choices. Evil Dead is supposed to be cutting-edge, hip, and filled with unpredictable splatter sequences. The latest looks like so many other horror films made by upstart filmmakers under the impression that murkiness and flimsy subtext dealing with things like domestic violence is the way to go. Instead, it’s lazy provocation.

The focal point of Evil Dead Burn is supposed to be Souheila Yacoub’s Alice, who is caught in the awkward position of having to spend time with her late husband’s family, who quietly resent her both for her absence of emotion and her unwillingness to take over the family business (in name only, never developed beyond a talking point). In this way, the film recalls Ready or Not, but Yacoub is no Samara Weaving. How could she be when Vaniček and Florent Bernard’s script renders her a passive presence until the body count adds up to the point where it has no choice but to hard-pivot to her and make her the true protagonist. So much of Evil Dead Burn is an aggravating, incoherent mess, especially seeing as the franchise had a strong foundation when Cronin’s predecessor batted up Alyssa Sutherland to be the face of the new series. Bruce Campbell’s Ash is but a distant memory now, for good reason, but the deeply felt helplessness Evil Dead Rise managed to convey is replaced instead by a sheer moroseness that plagues this from start-to-finish.

My review of The Evil Dead (1981)
My review of Evil Dead II
My review of Army of Darkness
My review of Evil Dead (2013)
My review of Evil Dead Rise

Starring: Souheila Yacoub, Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan, Erroll Shand, and Maude Davey. Directed by: Sébastien Vaniček.