The trailer for Evil Dead Rise has revealed a brutal return of the Deadites in Lee Cronin’s new addition to the horror franchise. This time around, Bruce Campbell’s Ash Williams is nowhere to be seen and the central location of a remote cabin has been replaced with a high rise apartment block. However, as Cronin recently explained to Total Film, the claustrophobic feel for the Evil Dead cabin has been transgressed into the movie’s apartment setting. He said:

While the trailer brought a lot of horror, there one element missing, which seems to be the humorous aspects the franchise has become almost as well known for. While it has been made clear that this is a movie set firmly in the world of The Evil Dead, those expecting comedic pauses should perhaps curb their expectation.

“It still needed to maintain some of the claustrophobia and that translated really well from the cabin into an urban environment. This is about a family in a rundown building stuck in their apartment. It follows the same rhythm but puts it in a more contemporary space. There’s no Ash in this story and there’s no cabin in the woods, and they’re two iconic elements of what ‘Evil Dead’ is. But the movie does include the book and an extraordinary amount of vicious, malevolent Deadites.”

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The Evil Dead franchise has become so well known for star Bruce Campbell, who over the years has been beaten up by his own hand, been thrown into medieval times and found himself fending off Deadites in a supermarket, that its original movie’s brutal horror has been absorbed into the horror comedy success of the franchise. Due to this, The Evil Dead has effectively become a separate entity to Evil Dead II and its sequel movie and series.

Just like Blumhouse’s Halloween trilogy picked up from John Carpenter’s first Michael Myers movie and created a new narrative from that point, Evil Dead Rise seems to be a successor to the original idea of The Evil Dead that ignores what came after it. Evil Dead II was essentially a remake of the first movie, just with more elaborate bloody special effects and many darkly comical moments that elevated the franchise beyond the nasty, graphic horror of the 1981 original.

While this means that we won’t be seeing a lot of catchphrases and slapstick humor, fans of the Evil Dead will find themselves being pulled back into the “video nasty” legacy of Sam Raimi’s world, where all he wanted to do was make a movie that went beyond the other horror movies of the time. Although there is some stiff competition from the likes of Terrifier 2 on that score, the way you look at a cheese grater may never be the same again.