Do yourself a favour: See Evil Dead Rise. Preferably on an empty stomach. Especially if you would like to make a horror film in 2023.
After all, Lee Cronin’s relentless, bloody love letter to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead I and II is a masterclass in many things: How to make an audience care about characters quickly you’re going to push to their limits, how to reference the past without soullessly echoing it, and how to keep your foot on the gas from start to finish. It’s an impressive feat for a director without a major credit to his name, coming off a small indie gem in The Hole in the Ground (2019), who has instantly become one of the most talked about filmmakers in the entire genre.
It’s deserved praise. Evil Dead Rise has resurrected the unholy franchise, keeping its soul and pushing it forward all at once, and audiences are loving it. The film has gotten superlative reviews from critics and viewers alike, bringing in big numbers at the global box office, all but ensuring that we’re going to be getting great Evil Dead films for years to come.
To break down how he accomplished it, Esquire Middle East sat down with Cronin to dissect Evil Dead Rise, now in cinemas cross the Middle East. Read our full conversation below.
Esquire Middle East sits down with Evil Dead Rise director Lee Cronin
How did you find the right tone for this? Because it balances a lot—the classic Evil Dead over-the-top horror sensibility, modern horror, comedy, family drama…
Yeah, I think the tone to me is always the most important thing of all. I always say, even if a movie isn’t the greatest story in the world, but the tone is right, you can really succeed in doing something. I wanted all of those things. I wanted to make a great movie, have a great tone, make it scary. But for me, it always starts with character and circumstance, situation, and also metaphor. So I hunted down the characters and the world and the idea and the themes of the movie, first of all, and then out of those, I let the horror grow so that the horror came from that source.
If you look at a lot of the fears in the movie, or the monstrous moments, they’re connected to what the film is about in terms of family and home and recognizable things. And therefore, there’s a connectivity between the horror and violence, and the metaphor and the characters in the story. And that, to me, felt like the appropriate way to kind of balance all of the things that I wanted to achieve with the movie, which ultimately was to make it scary and entertaining, with just a little bit of humor and a little bit of heart.
What was the kind of stuff you had to leave on the cutting room floor?
Luckily, we didn’t have to leave too much behind. I think the longest cut of the movie versus where we ended up was probably only about an eight-minute difference. Quite a number of the scenes we left behind were less the horror and gore focused scenes, but more to do with some of the familial drama, where I wanted to make sure I had plenty to work with in terms of bringing those characters to life. But also, I think we’re making an Evil Dead movie. You can only spend so much time in that character development before you have to get this particularly bloody show on the road. There are things that I left behind both on the page, and then also on the cutting room floor that I was a big fan of but I’m also not afraid to kill those things that get in the way of the overall experience. I wanted this movie to be a juggernaut. Ultimately, that was the goal. And I wasn’t afraid to make any decisions that would that I didn’t want to make any decisions that will compromise that. I wasn’t afraid to kick some stuff to the curb as required.
If you’re cutting a good eight minutes of character development, how did you ensure you had the most impactful amount of heart in the minimum amount of time?
I think a lot of that comes really from performance, so all that extra stuff was actually about the preparation for the movie to gave me the confidence that I would have enough to play with for those characters and so that they thy breathed real and they felt real and they felt familiar in some way. I think for character, less can sometimes be more if you really connect with the character very, very quickly. And so the rehearsal process was really impressive.
By rehearsals, I don’t mean sitting down and reading lines of dialogue from the screenplay, I actually meant getting those characters to know each other in a convincing way. So sometimes I’d said like I sent them off to the fairground together so that they would hang out. And, they started to form interestingly, because we would also, of course, still be reading from the script and discussing scenes. And I found what was interesting was they started to form bonds similar to their characters. So when Little Nell was tired, she tend to go towards Gabby who plays Bridget the, middle sister, just a little bit like she does in the movie, she gravitates towards her ever so slightly. I think that that was something that was really gave me actually a lot of confidence in terms of knowing that this family could feel authentic. It was really important because to me, it was a structural thing. If get to know the people, and then kick the sh** out of these people, that’s really what the movie had to be. So I needed the audience to understand them very quickly, upfront.
How were you ensure they could capture the flip side of that, once they play the possessed version of themselves?
It’s looking at the personalities of people, and being able to test those people. So for example, if I take young Gabby, who plays Bridget, she was very, very inexperienced, and she did a great read as an unpossessed Bridget. The I put her under the pressure to come back with more tape to show me how she’d interpret a ‘deadite’ without any direction, like read the script and show me what you could do. And what she did was kind of crazy, and wasn’t what I was looking for in the movie. But her effort and her endeavor and her commitment. That’s what I was looking for—an actor that would trust and believe and be able to go for it. And then what I do is work with them in that rehearsal process. We would bootcamp both in terms of them just being fit and physical, for the journey they had, but also the specific actions that they had to perform.
This is the second film in which you get tremendous performances out of younger performers. What’s the trick to directing kids?
Performance wise, I think creating inside jokes is quite good, especially with younger performers, and being able to almost have your own little private conversations, if we’re talking about younger performers specifically. Sometimes, it might even just be a code, like a funny little elbow to the side, and they’ll remind them of ‘Oh, remember that thing that we spoke about.’ I want to call it a language, but it’s not as detailed as that.
I quite often find, when I’m talking to an actor on set, like a sentence will start with ‘remember when we spoke about this’. It’s a little bit of like that rehearsal and memory recall. And, and then, for me, my job is to give people confidence and to be really honest with them, and to also be open to their ideas. And once you earn that trust, then you get to create these natural shortcuts on set.
What worked best with your youngest performer, Nell?
Like a silly example I give you would be with Nell Fisher, she’d sometimes come on set already wound up to be scared and I wouldn’t want her to use it for energy just yet. I need her to have that energy later. So I’d always have a new nickname for her every day to make her laugh and giggle and to kind of unprepared her and disarm her for a moment. So she’ll walk in one morning I’m like, ‘Hey, Nell-icopter’, and she laughed. You know what I mean? Or next day to be like, what’s up ‘Nell-evator’ and just to disarm the little bit of stress that they bring on set because you need that energy to be put across at just the right time, especially in a movie like this because the characters had to stay in such a heightened state I felt for the., The had to stay up here all the time.
And we shot the movie in sequence for the most part. So not only did they have to keep the energy of every given day, the beats per minute have to get higher and higher and higher as the movie went along. But I think it’s just about being personal. I think that’s what it comes down to. And, and forging professional but open kind of relationships in terms of how you communicate, and that people can speak up if they’re not comfortable, or they don’t understand something that they’re not afraid to say I don’t get it and put the pressure back on me to help them do their job to the best of their ability.
What were the conversations like with Evil Dead originators Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell?
The process really started with them saying, we really like your last movie, we like your attitude, we like your interest in the franchise. Now go figure it out, really. So they gave me a lot of freedom to do that. And when I returned with a story, they were very excited with how it was going in a new direction. It’s what they wanted. They knew that the franchise needed to go somewhere else. There was no point in just rebooting again, like 2013. This needed to be something that was new. And then the process really was just like anything when you make a movie—conversations, listening to people’s opinions, but ultimately, they let me be the arbiter of, which I felt was the right thing to do. They wanted to back a vision, and they hired me to have a vision for the movie. And they showed me that support throughout.
There are a lot of loving references to the film those two made together. Did you have it in mind how you wanted to write a love letter to their films from the outset, or did they find their way into the story organically?
I started by bringing my own ideas to the table, but always keeping this little catalog of ways that I could tip my cap to the past. I think one of the joys of horror moviemaking is that you can be referential, in a way. I think audiences enjoy being able to get a look back at that. The way that I brought things into the world, I tried to do them in a little bit of a different way. The balancing act was really being true to the new setup in the story.
How so?
For example, I would have loved to have had an Oldsmobile Delta in the film, because I’m an Evil Dead fan. But there was no way that family were driving that car, you know what I mean? It wouldn’t have matched with the world that they were in. But at the same time because of my love for the car, I kind of chose the oldest kind of car I could conceivably see that they would have, that also had a little bit of similarity and just felt similar. There were things like that, that I was aware of wouldn’t fit because you have to be led by the story that you’re telling now, not the stories that were told in the past.
Evil Dead is not the only thing you reference here though—there’s a lot of love given to the whole genre.
Yeah, I think my influences were locked in at an early age in terms of the movies that inspired me. There’s the obvious ones, such as The Shining. Then there’s the familiar terror of something like Poltergeist. This, including the Evil Dead series, are all movies that influenced me as a kid, but I didn’t sit down with those movies in front of me and go, ‘OK, how do I lean into these’, they’re just things that are already sewn into my voice and my vision and how I see horror. It just kind of naturally comes out from the experiences I had, especially as a younger viewer, because I think there’s certain things especially with horror, it digs its claws in at a young age, if you’re impressionable. Horror is like the beast you can’t shake off. It starts to naturally show itself through your writing and through the things that you choose to put on screen.
Are you willing to stick around for sequels? Have you already thought about where this could go next?
Yeah. look, I love the universe. There’s no doubt with my movie, that there are direct lines that could be drawn outwards into the future. And I’d like to think that my voice could still play a part and in the Evil Dead universe going forward, because I think I’ve refreshed it and cracked it open in a in a very, very different way. But ultimately, the audience always decide, right? the audience decide if they pay for more. Then, maybe, we’ll be able to bring them more.
Evil Dead Rise is now in cinemas across the Middle East. Get tickets here.