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Geek Exclusive: Director Lee Cronin Tapped on Covid-19 Lockdown Frustration To Raise The Gore In ‘Evil Dead Rise’

A new horror director is emerging from the ashes and while Irish director Lee Cronin may not be a name audiences are familiar with yet, his Evil Dead Rise might just change that. 

Best known as the writer-director of award-winning short Méliès d’Argent and the well-reviewed The Hole in the Ground, Cronin has now been tasked to direct the fifth installment to The Evil Dead franchise. In fact, he was specifically hand-picked by franchise creator Sam Raimi. 

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“Yeah, I think the first thing he (Sam Raimi) did was gauge my interest, and then I went off and thought about the story that I wanted to write, the screenplay that I wanted to write and then during that process, as I was thinking, we had many discussions,” said Cronin in an exclusive interview with Geek Culture about being chosen to direct the movie. 

“I do remember Sam saying to me, ‘Look, there’s two important things here. You’ve got to use the book and make sure the Deadites are scary,’ and in the nicest possible way I was like, ‘Of course,’ because the book is dear to me and making sure that those deadites were terrifying was of massive importance, but he showed me a hell of a lot of support and backing for what my vision was for the movie.” 

A direct sequel to Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise ditches the comedy and goes full out horror when Beth (Lily Sullivan) visits her older sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), who is struggling to raise three children alone in a small Los Angeles apartment. Their reunion gets bloody interrupted when they find a strange book hidden in the depths of Ellie’s building during an earthquake. The book, as fans of the long-standing franchise would know, releases horrid flesh-possessing demons. 

evil dead rise

This is the first time in the franchise where the story leaves the woods and heads for the city. While the location differs, Cronin guarantees that all the elements that fans love in the franchise are still intact – just that the proportion of gore, horror and comedy might differ.

Fede Álvarez’s 2013 soft requel Evil Dead is a fan-favourite amongst gore lovers, as the director famously used 50,000 gallons of fake blood just for the final scene alone. And while Raimi’s first The Evil Dead movie was a certified horror, the sequels that followed it leaned closer towards comedy. Hitting all three elements was of the greatest importance to the Evil Dead Rise director. 

“I wanted to make a very scary horror movie and the gore would be part of that. I thought about the gore, the horror as much as I possibly could but I also wanted there to be little pieces of light in the story, like little release valves where there’s little bits of levity and humour and funny lines that break the tension ever so slightly, so it was actually about blending those two things. That was the really important thing – getting that blend right,” he explained. 

evil dead rise

Getting horror right was an easy feat for the director who’s made five horror shorts and movies under his name, but striking a balance between horror and comedy was a definite challenge. Cronin found that focusing the comedy on a particular character – in this case, Deadite Ellie – and finding humanity in the tense moments helped him strike a balance between the two genres. Despite the challenge, Cronin has a lot of fun coming up with comedic dialogue. He even hopes to see some fan merchandise someday. 

“It’s always a challenge because it’s about getting the balance right and getting the tone right but I think the comedic elements or the lighter elements really come from character because the people feel real, and real people even in very dark times, often crack a joke or say something that’s inappropriate,” explained Cronin. 

“I kind of wanted the lighter parts or the levity to kind of come out with the circumstances and come out of the people with the pressure that they’re put under so in a way, by putting pressure on them, those little moments kind of start to happen. I also had the control of what the Deadite says, what possessed mom Ellie gets to say as well, and I had a lot of fun in creating some of her dialogue and lines. I’m hoping to see some of her dialogue on T-shirts very soon.” 

As for the gore, Cronin had a unique task. In previous sequels, many of the characters died by possession or disintegrated when the Book of the Dead gets thrown into fire. Of course, in classic Evil Dead fashion, some of the deadites met their end by chainsaw too. Seeing characters be strung up by an evil tree was a common occurrence as well. But setting up a big explosion in a small apartment is not the most feasible, and neither is having a chainsaw laying around the house when our characters are a single mother and her three young children. It also wouldn’t make sense to have a giant tree in an apartment. 

evil dead rise

So Cronin had to be creative. In one scene, a cheese grater was used to immobilise a character, while in another, we see a doll created by a five-year-old used for something other than playtime. Only a sicko can turn ordinary home objects into deadly weapons but in Cronin’s defense, he wrote the movie while in lockdown and had plenty of alone time to think and use his wildest imaginations for Evil Dead Rise. 

“I wrote this screenplay during the first wave of COVID, when everybody around the world was locked in their home, so I was in my little apartment in Dublin writing the screenplay on my bed, with this unseen force outside the door,” Cronin said. 

“I had a lot of time to look around the confines of my home and to feel a little bit trapped, and to freak out a little bit and start to identify the objects that I wanted to plant in the story and then to pay off later on in these kinds of increasingly crazy horrific but entertaining ways.” 

One thing missing from Evil Dead Rise is franchise hero Ash Williams, played by Bruce Campbell. It’s a question that gets asked repeatedly whenever a new Evil Dead movie gets brought up and Cronin wants to make it clear that Ash Williams will not appear in his movie. In fact, Ash Williams was never in his plans. 

“Well, Ash Williams was never going to really be in this movie, because it was definitely a departure and I think Bruce Campbell has publicly said that, you know, he can’t hold up his chainsaw.” 

Evil Dead Rise premieres in cinemas on 20 April 2023.