Scary Dad
Veteran “Evil Dead” star and producer Bruce Campbell is out plugging his latest flick “Black Friday” at present. No surprise though that the legendary thesp should be quizzed about the next instalment in the “Evil Dead” series while yakking with the media.
The next one, “Evil Dead Rise” is a standalone – which Campbell doesn’t appear – from director Lee Cronin. It shot in New Zealand last year.
The “Army of Darkness” alum says the new film, expected to premiere on the US streamer HBO Max in 2022, is visually gruesome.
“This one’s dark, this one’s pretty serious. Good, strong performances,” Campbell tells BlairWitch.De. “It’s a single mom who now has to deal with this book. These days it’s more about the book. That book gets around, that book is handed around, passed along, people try and get rid of it, they try to bury it or destroy it and they really can’t. So this book just keeps popping up, so really it’s just another story of what happens if this book appears in this particular group of people’s lives and how it intersects.”
He adds, “Lee Cronin is a very serious man, he’s a very serious director. Sam Raimi picked him because he did a pretty good job on a movie A Hole in the Ground. He’s a very atmospheric director and Sam thought, ‘Let’s give this guy a shot.’ It’s gonna be really good, we’ve seen a rough [cut] of it already and it has all the components we need. Like anything, when you see a rough version it just has to be tightened, but we’re good. We’re in good shape.”
The film is said to fix on a family that finds themselves terrorized by the Necronomicon. While Cronin had free reign to do whatever he wanted with the new film, expect plenty of franchise nods too.
“We let [filmmakers] have a lot of creative leeway, but the basics stay the same. The book, the possession, the rules of how you get rid of them,” Campbell confirmed. “Every new heroine or hero has to learn how to dispel the evil because, it’s one thing to conjure it, there are certain ways you conjure it, and there are certain ways you get rid of it. And not everybody figures that out easily. This family is not the same at the end of the movie. They’re gutted, the whole family’s destroyed. These people get possessed; brothers, sisters, sons, daughters. This one’s a family affair. They’re all related in this one. I think that makes the possession and, killing your siblings, things like that, even harder. Because in the original Evil Dead, there was one brother-sister combo, Ash and his sister Cheryl. The rest were just friends. Now, they’re all related in this household.”
