In the suffocating corridors of a crumbling high-rise, the ancient evil doesn’t just possess bodies—it crushes souls under the weight of concrete and despair.
Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise (2023) masterfully relocates the iconic cabin-in-the-woods nightmare to the grim confines of a Los Angeles apartment block, transforming the franchise’s signature gore-soaked chaos into a pressure cooker of familial dread and urban isolation. This article dissects the film’s most harrowing scenes, revealing how claustrophobia becomes the true monster, amplifying every splatter, scream, and snap of bone.
- Explore the pivotal elevator sequence, where spatial terror converges with visceral body horror in a masterclass of confined carnage.
- Break down the apartment’s transformation from sanctuary to slaughterhouse, highlighting production design’s role in ratcheting tension.
- Trace the film’s thematic evolution within the Evil Dead saga, from rural seclusion to metropolitan mayhem.
Elevator to Hell: Unpacking the Suffocating Scares in Evil Dead Rise
From Cabin Woods to Concrete Jungle
The Evil Dead franchise has long thrived on isolation, but Evil Dead Rise ingeniously flips the script by transplanting the Necronomicon’s curse from a remote Tennessee cabin to the derelict Brumby apartment complex in LA. Sisters Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) and Beth (Lily Sullivan) reunite amid domestic turmoil, only for their kids—Ellie’s teenagers Danny, Bridget, and Kassie, alongside Beth’s impending motherhood—to unearth the Marauder variant of the Book of the Dead in the basement. What follows is a ninety-six-minute descent into hell, where the high-rise’s labyrinthine layout turns every doorway into a potential deathtrap.
Cronin’s screenplay, penned solo after years of honing shorts like ABC’s of Death 2‘s “M is for Microwave,” builds tension through mundane domesticity clashing with supernatural eruption. The film opens with a pre-title shocker: two thrill-seeking campers discovering the Marauder amid a flooded cave, their gruesome demise setting a tone of relentless invention. Back in the tower, Ellie’s transformation into a Deadite puppet—spewing profanity-laced venom while wielding a wine bottle like Excalibur—ignites the chaos, her possession marked by bulging veins, inverted eyes, and a guttural rasp that echoes Sam Raimi’s originals.
Key cast shine amid the splatter: Sutherland channels maternal ferocity twisted into demonic glee, her performance peaking in a piano-wire garrotting scene that blends practical effects wizardry with raw emotional stakes. Sullivan’s Beth emerges as the Ash Williams surrogate, maternal instinct fueling her chainsaw-wielding rampage, while Milly Shapiro’s twisted take on possessed teen Bridget delivers lines like “Mommy’s gonna take your head off!” with chilling glee. The ensemble’s authenticity grounds the outlandish horror, making each loss feel personal in the cramped quarters.
The Apartment Labyrinth: Design as Dread
Production designer Nicki Gardiner crafts the Brumby as a character unto itself, its peeling wallpaper, flickering fluorescents, and narrow hallways evoking a vertical The Shining maze. Unlike the original’s expansive forest, here escape is illusory—lifts plummet, stairs creak under Deadite claws, and laundry chutes become fleshy slides to oblivion. This spatial constriction forces characters into intimate confrontations, every room a pressure vessel for escalating violence.
The film’s mid-section pivots on the kitchen melee, where Ellie-Deadite ambushes the family with a glass shard shiv, severing limbs in sprays of corn syrup blood. Cinematographer Dave Garbett’s Steadicam prowls the linoleum, capturing the frenzy in claustrophobic long takes that mimic the characters’ disorientation. Sound designer Mateusz Dylik layers metallic clangs with wet crunches, turning the domestic space into an auditory assault course.
Further down, the car park showdown introduces verticality’s peril: Beth rappels elevator shafts with bedsheets, Deadites swarming like rats in the vents. This sequence nods to The Descent‘s cave claustrophobia while honouring Raimi’s swing-from-the-trees antics, but the urban grit—puddles reflecting severed heads, graffiti-scarred walls—grounds it in millennial decay.
Scene Breakdown: The Doomed Elevator Plunge
No moment encapsulates Evil Dead Rise‘s claustrophobic genius like the elevator massacre, a fifteen-minute symphony of gore that rivals the franchise’s bloodiest. Bridget, possessed and piano-wired, lures Danny inside the lift, her jaw unhinging in a practical effect homage to Raimi’s stop-motion demons. As the doors seal, she pummels him against the walls, his screams muffled by the shaft’s echo.
Beth and Kassie witness from above, the grille framing the horror like a cinema screen within the screen. Cronin employs Dutch angles and fish-eye lenses to distort the box, amplifying panic; blood slicks the buttons, floors buckle under impacts. Danny’s improvised defence—a glass bottle to the eye—yields a geyser of fake plasma, but Bridget’s resilience turns the cabin into a blender of limbs.
The plunge itself is kinetic poetry: cables snap in slow-motion, the car hurtling past floors in a blur of fluorescent strobes. Impact shatters the roof, impaling Bridget on rebar—yet she rises, head lolling, for a final chainsaw decapitation. This scene’s brilliance lies in its economy: confined space maximises every squelch and splatter, viewer empathy trapped alongside the victims.
Laundry Chute Carnage: Vertical Violation
Another standout is the laundry chute sequence, where little Kassie slides into the abyss, tumbling through industrial dryers amid a Deadite infestation. The camera follows her descent in a single unbroken shot, fabrics billowing like funeral shrouds, machinery grinding bones. Ellie-Deadite awaits below, her tongue lolling impossibly long to snatch the girl, pulling her into a mangle of flesh and lint.
This verticality motif recurs, subverting the high-rise’s promise of upward mobility into downward doom. Practical effects maestro Toby Bird constructs the chute with hydraulic pistons for realistic motion, silicone appliances for mutilations that hold up under scrutiny. The sequence’s terror stems from childhood vulnerability amplified by enclosure—no wide shots for relief, just relentless proximity.
Beth’s rescue attempt, hacking through walls with a drill, blends power-tool frenzy with maternal desperation, echoing Ash’s boomstick bravado but filtered through female rage. The aftermath—Kassie’s possession manifesting in eerie doll-play—prolongs the dread, turning playrooms into pandemonium.
Gore Galore: Practical Effects Mastery
Evil Dead Rise restores the franchise’s practical effects throne, with over 150 squibs and gallons of blood crafted by Bird’s team. Standouts include Ellie’s cheese-grater facial reconstruction—skin peeled in reverse, revealing musculature—and Danny’s jaw-ripping, achieved via pneumatics and dental rigs. No CGI shortcuts dilute the tactility; each wound throbs with handmade verisimilitude.
Cronin’s effects philosophy, influenced by Tom Savini’s Dawn of the Dead, prioritises performer endurance: Sutherland wore full-body appliances for hours, her commitment yielding authentic convulsions. The Marauder’s rune-etched pages, forged from antique leather, ground the supernatural in tangible dread, their incantations triggering stop-motion swarms of skeletal hands.
These spectacles serve narrative, not mere shock: gore visualises emotional rupture, family bonds literally torn asunder. Compared to Evil Dead (2013)’s remake, Cronin’s restraint—saving tsunamis for climaxes—heightens impact, proving less blood can flood more terror.
Soundtrack of Suffering: Audio Claustrophobia
Composer Stephen McKeon’s score eschews heavy metal for dissonant strings and industrial percussion, mimicking the building’s groans. Deadite voices, layered by Foley artists with pig squeals and reversed whispers, burrow into the psyche like the evil itself. The elevator’s ding signals doom, a Pavlovian cue in the sonic cage.
Mix engineer Glenn Freemantle balances intimacy—breaths ragged in close quarters—with chaos bursts, subwoofers rumbling for basement rumbles. This auditory design traps viewers aurally, mirroring the characters’ plight.
Family Bonds in the Bloodbath: Thematic Fractures
At its core, Evil Dead Rise interrogates fractured families under siege. Ellie’s single motherhood, strained by absent exes, explodes into demonic domesticity; Beth’s absentee status forces belated heroism. The kids embody generational tensions—Danny’s emo isolation, Bridget’s rebellion—ripe for possession metaphors.
Cronin weaves class critique: the Brumby’s low-income decay contrasts glossy LA, the curse preying on the marginalised. Gender flips abound—women wield the weapons—challenging macho tropes while retaining gleeful excess. Trauma lingers post-possession, survivors scarred, questioning redemption’s possibility.
In franchise context, it expands Sam Raimi’s slapstick to ensemble tragedy, bridging to Evil Dead TV’s broader canvas without diluting purity.
Legacy Lift-Off: Franchise Resurrection
Premiering at SXSW to ecstatic reviews, Evil Dead Rise grossed $147 million on a $17 million budget, proving the Deadites’ enduring appeal. It spawned merchandise booms and fan recreations, its elevator meme-ified online. Sequels loom, with Cronin eyeing crossovers, cementing urban horror’s viability.
Influencing peers like Barbarian, it revitalises possession subgenre through spatial innovation, a high-rise haunter for modern anxieties.
Director in the Spotlight
Lee Cronin, born in 1983 in Ballantrae, South Ayrshire, Scotland, but raised in Ireland’s rugged landscapes, emerged as a horror auteur with a penchant for psychological unease rooted in folklore. After studying at the National Film and Television School, he cut his teeth on shorts like The Tunnel (2010), a faux-found-footage chiller that screened at festivals worldwide. His feature debut The Hole in the Ground (2019) garnered BAFTA nominations for its tale of maternal doubt and changeling myths, starring Séamus Laverty and a haunting Kila Killick.
Cronin’s influences span The Exorcist to Irish legends, evident in his atmospheric dread. Evil Dead Rise (2023) marked his Hollywood leap, produced by Raimi, Tapert, and Gorton, blending franchise fealty with personal vision. Post-rise, he helmed Longlegs (2024), a serial-killer occult thriller starring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage, lauded for its retro stylings and box-office bite.
Filmography highlights: ABC’s of Death 2 segment “M is for Microwave” (2014), a domestic nightmare; The Hole in the Ground (2019), folk-horror slow-burn; Evil Dead Rise (2023), gore revival; Longlegs (2024), atmospheric procedural. Upcoming: The Housemistake, expanding his haunted-home oeuvre. Cronin’s career trajectory—from indie festivals to blockbuster gore—positions him as horror’s next evolutionist, with Raimi praising his “ferocious imagination.”
Actor in the Spotlight
Lily Sullivan, born 3 April 1993 in Brisbane, Australia, rose from soap stardom to international scream queen, her poise masking a fearless dive into grue. Discovered at 11 in Morton & Me (2006), she honed craft in Home and Away (2008-2010) as breezy teen Sasha, earning Logie nods. Theatre stints like Bad Jews sharpened her edge before Mental (2012) with Toni Collette showcased comedic timing.
Breakout came with Galore (2013) and Jungle (2017), but horror beckoned via A24’s Monsters of Man (2020). Evil Dead Rise (2023) catapulted her: as resilient Beth, she endured chainsaw prosthetics and blood deluges, her raw physicality drawing Bruce Campbell comparisons. Critics hailed her “Ash 2.0 with heart.”
Filmography: Randling (2012, short); Mental (2012); Galore (2013); Pan (2015); Jungle (2017); Swimming (2020? Wait, Monsters of Man 2020); Evil Dead Rise (2023); Practical Magic 2 (upcoming). TV: Home and Away (2008-10); <em=Rake (2012). Awards: AACTA noms for Galore. Sullivan’s trajectory—from Aussie ingenue to gore icon—promises more terrors ahead.
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Bibliography
Cronin, L. (2023) Evil Dead Rise production notes. Ghost House Pictures. Available at: https://www.ghosthousepictures.com/evildead-rise-behind-scenes (Accessed: 15 October 2024).
Jones, A. (2024) Gorehounds: Practical Effects in Modern Horror. Midnight Marquee Press.
Kaufman, L. (2023) ‘Elevator to Oblivion: Spatial Horror in Evil Dead Rise‘, Sight & Sound, 33(5), pp. 42-47.
McKeon, S. (2023) Interview: Scoring the Deadite Uprising. Film Score Monthly. Available at: https://www.filmscoremonthly.com/features/lee-cronin-interview (Accessed: 15 October 2024).
Raimi, S. and Tapert, R. (2023) Evil Dead Rise commentary track. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
Sullivan, L. (2024) ‘From Soaps to Splatter’, Empire Magazine, January, pp. 78-82.
Wooley, J. (2024) ‘Claustrophobia in Contemporary Slashers’, Journal of Horror Studies, 12(2), pp. 112-130.