Evil Dead Burn: How does it connect to the other films in the saga?
The sixth entry in Sam Raimi’s long-running horror franchise is filled with plenty of other deep cuts and franchise Easter eggs tying it to previous movies.
Evil Dead Burn is fueled by the death of Will (George Pullar), husband of Alice (Souheila Yacoub) and eldest son of a broken family. Before the main story begins, the film makes some important connections to legacy lore, revealing that Will and Joseph’s grandfather was a close friend of Professor Raymond Knowby.
As longtime fans will recall, Professor Knowby is the voice on the infamous tape recorder from Sam Raimi’s original two Evil Dead films, recounting his discovery of the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis and the Kandarian demon it unleashed. The family home is littered with audio reels documenting the grandfather’s work with Knowby, loose Necronomicon pages and a sketch directly referencing Fede Álvarez’s 2013 Evil Dead soft-reboot.
The film also reveals that Knowby and the grandfather were part of “The Circle of Sages,” a group that studied the Book of the Dead and was looking for a way to repel the Deadites. The name is a direct reference to the Wise Man from Raimi’s Army of Darkness who helps Ash Williams and apparently passes down his ancient knowledge to the generation that would eventually make up Knowby’s inner circle.
The sequel also provides a much better reason for why the Deadites are after this particular family: the grandfather owned a Kandarian dagger that could kill them. Fans of Evil Dead know these blades and Burning of Evil reveals that there is an entire cache of them. The film even includes a meta-gag similar to Evil Dead II, when a character stabs a Deadite with the wrong weapon, causing the demon to jeer, “Wrong knife!”
While those threads link the new film directly to the original trilogy and the 2013 remake, it’s Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise that has the tightest connective tissue.
The Evil Dead Rise Links & Post-Credits Setup
In many ways, Evil Dead Burn acts as a stealth sequel to Evil Dead Rise, picking up the pieces right after the framing narrative of the 2023 film.
In case you’re not up to speed, Rise takes place in a lake house cabin where a possessed woman named Jessica kills all of her friends. In Burning of Evil, two fishermen drop anchor in that lake and snag the severed head of Caleb, another victim of the Rise, before they are ambushed by Jessica, who has claimed the area as her personal hunting ground. Having killed the fishermen, Jessica takes Will’s car, drives off the pavement, stalking the lakeside road, and chooses Will as her next vessel, setting off the whole new story.
The callbacks lead up to a key stinger. The mid-credits scene is an Evil Dead classic slapstick gag, as a possessed grandmother steals the legs of a bystander to walk again, but the final post-credits scene lays the groundwork for the franchise’s future.
The sequence cuts back to the funeral home from the film’s first act, where the director’s daughter is looking over unclaimed urns. One of the urns is labeled “Ellie,” the tragic mother played by Alyssa Sutherland in Evil Dead Rise. When the girl looks in the mirror, Ellie’s image looks back. Ellie shows up, kills the girl and delivers the chilling final line, “Mommy’s back.”
How Ellie comes back after being thoroughly pureed in a wood chipper is yet to be seen, but the scene opens the door for the franchise’s most memorable modern Deadite to return.
Okay, we already know that the next movie in the works, Evil Dead Wrath, is a prequel set in the 1970’s, before the original 1981 movie. Is Sam Raimi quietly working on another sequel to continue Ellie’s resurrected storyline? Looks like it certainly does. Stay tuned.
