Fans of the “Evil Dead” franchise know the drill — get some folks out to a cabin in the woods, have them stumble onto an ominous book of spells, gory demonic mayhem ensues.
With “Evil Dead Rise,” however, the fifth installment in the series created by Sam Raimi, director Lee Cronin set out to carve a different path.
“I knew I wanted it to be family. I knew I wanted there to be children. And I knew I wanted to take it to the city,” he told the Post. “An apartment in LA is about as far as you can get from a cabin in the woods.”
Cronin’s contribution to the franchise comes forty years, almost to the day, after the first movie, “The Evil Dead,” opened in 1981.
The now-cult classic wowed audiences with innovative, low-budget effects that rained buckets of blood on its unfortunate characters — some more than others.
As one critic noted years later, the female characters in Raimi’s original seem to have a particularly rough time of it, being “variously raped … hacked to pieces, stabbed, bludgeoned, incarcerated, buried and burned — and none of them survive to get justice.”
One woman is even graphically sexually assaulted by a possessed tree, in a scene that even Raimi has called out as “unnecessarily gratuitous.”
This time around, women are squarely at the center of the action, rather than lining up to be sliced and diced.
The plot of “Evil Dead Rising” revolves around two adult sisters, Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) and Beth (Lily Sullivan), trapped by demons inside Ellie’s apartment with her three kids. And — spoiler alert, if you haven’t watched the trailer — single mom Ellie ends up possessed by demons in short order.
“To be a really bad, bad, bad, bad, mother — I was so excited to do that,” Sutherland told The Post. “The possession scene, there’s a different take on it. We’re not dealing with a woman who was raped by a tree. I was happy with that.”
Cronin, who wrote the film, says he was inspired to flip the script by some of the women in his life.
“The mother figures in my life have been amazing,” he said. “My sister has three kids. She was a single mother for a period of time. I’m like, thank you for your life circumstances, so I can use them to tell a story!”
Not that a possessed Ellie is any kind of model mom — she’s a terrifying menace, nodding at old domestic-horror films like “Carrie,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Shining,” the latter given a prominent hat tip with a scene involving an elevator full of blood.
“It could be tough for some actors to be in this tormented place, but I found it quite easy,” said Sutherland. “I have a lot of unexpressed rage, and I think a lot of women can probably relate to that. I found it very therapeutic!”
Sullivan’s character, Beth, meanwhile, is the bohemian little sister who’s pregnant — and is repeatedly told by her now-evil sibling that she’ll be a terrible mother.
“That’s a really deep-seated thing,” Sullivan told The Post. “I like that we’re tapping into that fear.”
Even in the film’s eleventh hour, the director said, the stress of being a good-enough parent — or, in this case, very much not — looms large.
As an embattled, blood-soaked demon, “Ellie is still talking about the fact that Beth won’t be a good mother,” he said.
For Cronin, the switch to a domestic setting also brings the horror closer to what will be a familiar world for a majority of viewers.
It’s one thing to imagine the potential creepiness of a remote, rural cabin — and quite another to contemplate the horror next door.
“If you live in an apartment, you don’t know what’s going on upstairs,” Cronin said. “There could be somebody breeding tarantulas. You just have no idea, and I find that incredibly unnerving.”
