new american extremity

 

Historically, the Evil Dead franchise is not a political powder keg.

The first three films are a time lapse in watching young professionals hone their craft through gory homage and pastiche. They're bonafied classics, yes, but hard-hitting social commentary wasn't on Sam Raimi's mind. Together with Rob Tapert and Bruce Campbell, Raimi wanted give every last ounce in his tank to shock audiences and make them laugh. Over 40 years later, he continues to succeed.

Fede Alvarez's Evil Dead embraced the original films' "go for broke" spirit in 2013, but added some modern flourishes. Chief among these was a more vulnerable lead than Ash was past the first film. Protagonist Mia, a recovering heroin addict, struggles to convince her brother and friend that she hasn't relapsed as demons torment them. This movie played on audience expectations about addiction, and hinged upon the audience believing a woman who many would consider unsympathetic. It was a subversive choice, and one that moved the needle in terms of what audiences could fairly expect from Evil Dead.

Evil Dead Rise swung even harder. A mother and her three kids are tormented by Deadites after the mom's estranged sister returns. The film is a messy, ugly unpacking of gender and sex norms breaking into feminine spaces and violating them. It's an anxious story of a progressive, "Woke 1" family being torn asunder by the wolves eager to strip their bodies for parts and crush their spirits. While it relies a little too much on homage and pastiche, it's an ambitious, nasty little film that justifies its existence even in spite of some mixed messaging. 

 

Evil Dead (2013) and Rise are how this franchise gets to something like this year's Evil Dead Burn. It's a furious film with pointed, overt messaging around the contemporary American social climate. The picture's runtime is stuffed with both loaded imagery and overt messaging around domestic violence, and how it's normalized as a system of control within families. Parts of the film feel like vitriolic activism, a bitter and brutal polemic against abuse and those who perpetuate it. All the while, it pushes buttons with its splatter-slicked chaos, as Sebastien Vanicek uses an R rating to more gristly effect than any studio horror flick in some time.

But Evil Dead Burn isn't informed by the cinematic language of modern horror. The shaky digital cinematography, laced together with smash zooms and quick cuts, evokes mid-aughts examples of the genre. So, too, does the washed out and desolate gray palette which hangs like a fog over the film. It's a look familiar to those familiar with Saw, Hostel, and other extreme cinema around that era. Yet it's most reminiscent, to me, of the European contemporary to torture porn: New French Extremity. Where filmmakers like Eli Roth half-attempted centrist commentary between eyeball removals and literal blood baths, European directors embraced overt political material to make their statements in no uncertain terms.

Burn takes a similar tact here. The film follows Alice (Souheila Yacoub), a newly widowed survivor of domestic abuse. Her husband, Will (George Pullar,) is a hotshot American cook with a fetish for French cuisine and women. After getting drunk and lashing out at Alice at his brother's birthday party, Will speeds off into the night. He doesn't get far, though, as a shambling Deadite steps in front of his car and sends him careening into the dark forest. He dies in a fiery explosion, and leaves his restaurant to Alice in his will.

 

Alice, however, wants no part of it. She doesn't want anything to do with Will's family, in fact. But after an uncomfortable funeral service, the shellshocked woman is cajoled into staying in the family's remote and decrepit country home. Right away, things are off. Dad's in the basement talking to himself and slicing into his skin. Meanwhile, grandma's lost her mind to dementia and is accusing her grandson's WOC partner of being a thief. All the while, mom's in the kitchen drinking wine and trying to keep herself together as her grief-stricken countenance haunts each scene like a specter. 

Susan (Tandi Wright) wants a partner who loves her, a mentally present mother, a successful and alive son. She has none of these. Husband Edgar (Erroll Shand) is an emotionally vacant lout, his fragile mind now taken by Deadite influence. Polly (Maude Davey), meanwhile, can't keep days, places, or people straight. As demons begin to prey on the family, the geriatric grandmother is powerless, often seated or strapped to an electric lift. These three, once shielded by capital, are reduced to nothing in the face of ancient evil. It consumes them, one by one, as it searches for the one weapon which can be its undoing kept somewhere secret in the house. 

Above everything, Evil Dead Burn is a family drama. It is a gory, disgusting, often repellent picture, yes. A nasty piece of work. But it's all built on a foundation of trans-generational trauma and discontent. Vanicek mines potent material from the insular, dilapidated lives of the petty bourgeois and finds nothing but existential despair. Each family member is haunted by a gray emptiness, an internal void collapses in on itself as it sucks in everyone and everything around it. Wealth cannot plug this hole, and neither can status. 

As they are mentally and physically torn apart, the family's longstanding mistreatment of Alice comes to light. Will's violent, possessive abuse of her has been swept under the rug for years. The Price family has treated her like a fancy import, an accessory for their son. Vanicek draws constant attention to how the men in this family treat women like dogs. Both are whistled towards, scolded into place, and brutalized by each man throughout the course of Burn. It's a queasy but necessary observation in the age of the puppygirl, a fetish which has been eagerly lapped up by male porn producers. Power structures which allow men to animalize and thereby dominate women are enmeshed in socioeconomic patriarchy. In other words: we call women "bitches" for a reason. 

Physical harm in Evil Dead Burn reflects the psychological violence meted out between characters. It's visceral and specific, messy but personal, with carnage that spills everywhere and touches everyone. Dinner utensils, landscaping tools, and car seat headrests are jammed into human (and animal) bodies in imaginative, bizarre ways. This is the messiest a studio horror has been willing to get in a minute, and feels like a direct response to limited market smashes like Terrifier. It's much more vile than Rise, with more tangible practical gore and specific gross-out moments more in line with Raimi's original. Sometimes, it's just as gross to watch a disembowelment as it is to see a girl yank out a woman's pair of dentures, lick them, then put them back into her mouth.  

 

 

One of the primary critiques of Burn I've seen is that it isn't very funny. I disagree. It's hilarious if you've got a sick sense of humor. Amid the film's pitch black subject matter, Vanicek mines laughs from aging, declining mental health, and the absurd ways people can die. There's none of the corny mugging for the camera, then cracking a one-liner that dragged down the last movie and even parts of Evil Dead (2013.) The laughter here, I think, is much more organic and predicated on the audience having some kind of personal issue they're working out while watching it. Less goofy laughs, more cathartic chuckles through winces.

It goes back to New French Extreme, a misunderstood and overlooked genre in North America. Films like High Tension and Frontiers are still remembered more as endurance tests than high art in this region. But grotesque as they are, they're much more deliberate pictures than their contemporaries, steeped in politics incongruous with American sensibilities of the early 2000s. When viewed today, these film paint a distressing picture of global fascism on the rise. They're heightened satire penned in blood, with decapitations as punchlines. The sheer shock and audacity of what's happening is meant to make the audience laugh from disbelief, as opposed to wisecracks or pratfalls.

Evil Dead Burn takes a similar approach with a specific aim. Its protagonist is an abused immigrant used as a prop, then captured and tortured by a rich white family. The intersections of race and sex are manipulated to trap her in circumstances beyond her control or comprehension. It's a scarehouse of American ills, a foggy mirror of our current era akin to the false reflection in Evil Dead II. As if the film is jumping out of the screen and shaking at us, telling us to get a grip and look around us. It's an angry picture, the way good horror ought to be. Misogyny and xenophobia terrify Vanicek and compel him to make something repellent enough to articulate those fears.

So yes, Evil Dead Burn is sad and gross. But it's also funny in its audacity, in its willingness to push the envelope and sick audiences out in new ways. It's got that kid in a candy store feeling of both Evil Dead II and Evil Dead (2013), with a genuine sicko in control of a decent budget, eager to make audiences squirm in their seats and yelp in shock. More than those films, however, Evil Dead Burn feels like it has something to say more than prove. It uses the utility and function of gore to shock audiences into submission, then pelt them with the director's point. The Evil Dead property itself is just something for this film to infest, corrupt, and surprise Joe Horror Fan with. Consider me shocked.