Evil Dead Burn

Evil Dead Burn (2026) is an American supernatural horror film directed by Sébastien Vaniček, who co-wrote it with Florent Bernard, and produced by series creator Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert through Ghost House Pictures. It is the sixth film in the Evil Dead series and a follow-up to Evil Dead Rise (2023). Where the earlier films sent friends to a cabin or a family to a high-rise, Burn sends a widow to a funeral: Alice Price (Souheila Yacoub) buries the husband who used to put his hands on her, then goes back to his family’s remote house to grieve alongside the in-laws who smiled at her wedding and blamed her at the wake. Buried in that family’s history is research into the Necronomicon and the one blade that can send a Deadite home — and in this family, the dead do not stay politely in the urn.

At a glance

Plot summary

The Price family has an inheritance nobody talks about. Generations back, grandfather Benjamin Price researched the Necronomicon — the Book of the Dead — and the Kandarian Dagger, the one weapon that can banish a flesh-possessing Deadite back to Hell, then walled the whole business up and let the family forget. The forgetting ends with his grandson Will, who dies in a fireball on a rural road after a possessed stranger steps in front of his car — and what climbs out of that wreck wearing Will’s charred face is not Will. At the crematorium, his widow Alice is gathered up by the Prices: mother-in-law Susan, who preserves the myth of the perfect family the way other people preserve jam; father-in-law Edgar; brother-in-law Joseph and his girlfriend Thya; and grandmother Polly, losing her memory in the big house where the old sins are stored.

The evil does not wait for anyone to read a page aloud — this time it is already awake and scheming before the family even sits down to dinner. It takes the Prices the way rot takes a house: one relative at a time. Edgar succumbs first, and turns on the family dog. Thya dies on a hospital run that never arrives. Polly, sweet harmless Polly, becomes the thing whispering promises about the family being together again. And Alice — who survived her marriage by enduring it — has to survive her in-laws wearing Deadite faces, fighting through the house with whatever comes to hand while the memories of what Will really was keep surfacing. The Prices want the dagger. Alice is done surrendering things.

Spoiler section: the ending

It ends the way everything in this family ends: in fire. Alice kills the possessed Joseph with the Kandarian Dagger, ending his possession the only way the book allows. She takes Susan’s head off with a rotary saw, seriously wounds Edgar, kills the resurrected dog Max with the dagger, and sets the house ablaze around them. Outside, in the ashes, Will is waiting — charred, patient, hers. She flees to a nearby construction site, where he cripples her leg and traps her in a pit filling with boiling tar. Alice fights him with a jackhammer, then drives the dagger into him. For one moment she sees Will as he was, human again, telling her he loves her. Her answer is the whole movie in three words: “That’s not enough.” She crushes his Deadite head with her bare hands. When the police and paramedics find her crawling on the road and ask who did this to her, she tells them the truth: “My ex-husband.” Stay through the credits — twice. Polly escaped the fire by severing her own leg and is loose on the road, and at a crematorium across the story, the Deadite Ellie Bixler — the possessed mother from Evil Dead Rise, whose ashes were never claimed — opens her eyes.

Production and behind the scenes

A sixth Evil Dead film was announced in February 2024, with Raimi personally handing the keys to Vaniček after seeing Infested, his 2023 debut about a Paris apartment block overrun by spiders — from eight legs to Deadites, the most natural career move in horror. Vaniček co-wrote the script with Florent Bernard, and revealed the title, Evil Dead Burn, in December 2024. Raimi and Rob Tapert produced through Ghost House Pictures, with Bruce Campbell and Rise director Lee Cronin among the executive producers; the film was co-financed by New Line Cinema and Sony’s Screen Gems, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. Casting began in May 2025, led by Souheila Yacoub — known to wider audiences from Dune: Part Two — as Alice.

Like Rise before it, the film was shot in New Zealand, with principal photography running from July 22 to October 17, 2025, and Philip Lozano behind the camera. The score is by Double Danger, the French electronic duo of Douglas Cavanna and Xavier Caux, who also scored Infested; the soundtrack album arrived on WaterTower Music on July 3, 2026, a week before the film. And then there is the cut you did not see. Vaniček has said the MPA initially flagged the film for an NC-17, and that he reworked a single sequence — his version was, in his words, colder and rawer rather than simply gorier — to bring it down to an R. The scene is still in the film. Somewhere, there is a nastier Evil Dead Burn.

Release and reception

Evil Dead Burn was released in US theaters on July 10, 2026, by Warner Bros. Pictures — moved up from an original July 24 date. It opened in fourth place with $13.7 million, softer than projections and well below Rise‘s debut, but against a $20 million budget it went on to gross $72.4 million worldwide ($32.2 million of it domestic). Critics were warmer than the opening weekend suggested: it holds a 70% score on Rotten Tomatoes from 211 critics, a 54 on Metacritic, and a B grade from CinemaScore audiences. Think Horror’s review of Evil Dead Burn scored it 3.5 out of 5 skulls — “Bleeds like a champion” — calling its practical carnage the meanest and most inventive the series has ever staged, while finding the film long where its ancestors were lean and missing some of Raimi’s giggle.

The film arrived on digital on August 4, 2026, and on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD on September 22, 2026. Its second life was bigger than its first: it began streaming on HBO Max on October 2, 2026 and hit #1 on the US movie chart within days, riding spooky season the way Rise rode streaming before it. Gore this practical, it turns out, plays very well from the couch.

Legacy and influence

Burn is the film that confirmed the modern Evil Dead model as a system rather than a streak. No Ash, no cabin nostalgia act: Raimi and Tapert act as gatekeepers, handing the book to a hungry young director — Fede Álvarez, Lee Cronin, now Vaniček — and each new family bleeds in its own sealed room. It also pushed the franchise’s mythology further out than any entry since the original trilogy: the Circle of the Wise Men, the Kandarian Dagger’s history, and a family bloodline tangled up with the book give the modern films connective tissue back to Professor Knowby and 1981. The film’s afterlife arrived fast — it was adapted into a haunted house at Halloween Horror Nights 2026 at both Universal Studios Hollywood and Universal Orlando — and its post-credits threads point directly down the road the series is already traveling: Francis Galluppi’s Evil Dead Wrath, a prequel set in 1973, is due in 2028. Forty-five years in, the floor of this franchise remains higher than most series’ ceilings.

Trivia

• The polite cut: the version in theaters was trimmed to dodge an NC-17. Vaniček reworked one sequence he described as colder and rawer — the scene is still there, just survivable.
• Hired off spiders: Raimi handed Vaniček the film after seeing Infested (2023), his debut about a Paris apartment block overrun by spiders.
• The longest Evil Dead: at 109 minutes, Burn is the longest film in the forty-five-year-old series — you can feel the extra twenty in the middle.
• The wake is a first: it is the first entry built around a funeral instead of a cabin trip, and the first where the evil is already awake and scheming before anybody reads a single page aloud.
• The evil walks in from Rise: the possessed Jessica who steps in front of Will’s car is the same Deadite who opened Evil Dead Rise — the infection literally drives in from the last film.
• Ash, in photographs only: executive producer Bruce Campbell appears in the film solely in family photographs. Fans speculated one of the photos was meant to be grandfather Benjamin; Campbell denied it.
• The voice of the grandfather: Benjamin Price is voiced by Michael Hurst — Hercules himself, uncredited on screen and hiding in the family’s walls.
• Stay in your seat: there are two post-credits scenes. One frees Polly. The other reaches all the way back to Evil Dead Rise and wakes up Ellie Bixler.

Related links

• Evil Dead Burn (2026) review — Think Horror’s full review (3.5 out of 5 skulls)
• The Evil Dead (1981) — the one that started everything, in our wiki
• Evil Dead Rise — the high-rise chapter whose threads walk straight into this one
• Evil Dead Wrath — the 1973-set prequel next in line for the bloodline
• Sam Raimi — who built this house and now produces from the porch
• Bruce Campbell — executive producer here; the chin is retired, the carnage isn’t