Exquisite Terror sat down with Sébastien Vaniček, director and co-writer of Evil Dead Burn, the sixth entry in the beloved horror franchise, to discuss a character-first approach to writing, using extremity to tell human-centric stories, and the horror of spending time with family.
Since the 2013 soft reboot, the Evil Dead films have focussed more on character and emotion — specifically about dealing with grief and trauma. How have you and your co-writer Florent Bernard continued this with Evil Dead Burn?
That’s the first thing we talked about. We knew about The Evil Dead, we know what Evil Dead is about, and I wasn’t too worried about things like the kills, violence, brutality, horror. But characters were something we need to work and so we started with that.
We started with Alice (Souheila Yacoub) and what we wanted to do with love. If you don’t care about the character, you will never be afraid or you will never feel anything. So, create good characters and then you can go on with the scares.
It’s interesting you say love, because that’s not often a word people would associate with The Evil Dead.
They still do it, but when you zoom in you will feel Ash was in love with his girlfriend and there’s the brother and sister in Fede [Álvarez]’s movie and Lee Cronin talked about the mother and her children. It’s always about love and are you ready to kill the people you love? So that’s, I think, the hardest question.
For many — especially queer and trans people — the idea of spending time with in-laws and family is already a horror story. How have you played with this idea and upped the ante of the horror of the home?
There’s kind of a universal feeling that when you fall in love with someone, you have to welcome a whole new family, new friends or new people you didn’t invite, but they come with the person you love. For example, the fact that we put that dinner scene as a turning point. It means something; everybody can relate to this kind of horrible dinner moment where you have that crazy uncle or your mother is trying to tell you something and she’s kind of a bitch to you, but you don’t want to tell her. There’s a universal feeling that love can hurt a lot and can lead to hatred pretty fast. Gathering a lot of people that love each other in a different way is likely to be the start of chaos.
Your debut feature, Infested (AKA Vermines), used ideas of infestation and the innate horror of spiders to explore xenophobia. Have you taken a similar approach with social commentary when writing Deadites?
Horror is the best way to talk about heavy things because it’s a rollercoaster of emotions. I think movies like Jordan Peele’s were very important to me. When I saw Get Out, I was like, that’s the best way to write a movie. So that’s what I’m trying to do when I write my own stuff. I start with characters and I try to put the conflicts and create characters that are opposite and have paradoxes.
I think in The Evil Dead especially, the horror doesn’t lie in Deadites and evil arriving on Earth. It really lies in what’s happening to Alice, because that’s real. That’s something when you go out of the theatre that still exists.
With Vermines, it was the same. People who are judged by how they look, where they come from, who they love, whatever, we want to put them in a box and we want to put them in some part of the house and forget them. When they go out of the box, that becomes a big problem. That’s the real horror. I think horror is the best way to talk about this kind of subject.
With your background in French horror, and with Evil Dead Burn being billed as the most extreme entry in the series, were you actively drawing from New French Extremity movies like Martyrs and Frontier(s)?
When I was a teenager, I remember discovering High Tension and then Martyrs and then Gaspar Noé’s movies. I was really shocked by those movies, and I remember discovering the camera work and being amazed and thinking I can feel these movies physically.
When they gave me the opportunity to do an Evil Dead movie, I was definitely like, I’m going to make a French Extremity movie, for sure. I’m going to have a grounded violence. I won’t have litres of blood, but I will have teeth on the sidewalk, like in American History X, because that’s something that hurts me more than other things.
That’s the thing I told Rob [Tapert] and Sam [Raimi] as soon as I had the job. I told them, I can’t promise you we will have the bloodiest, but I can tell you I will try to make the most brutal.
What role has humour played in Evil Dead Burn, and is there still space for humour in the franchise forty-five years after the first film was released?
I think what Sam Raimi did is Sam Raimi. Nobody can do what he did. It’s his style, the slapstick style. Fede didn’t put humour in, Lee was a bit different. But for my part, I didn’t want to put humour in just because it’s The Evil Dead. I put humour in like I did in Vermines. I love horror when you can laugh and you can release pressure and then put the pressure back. It’s so extreme that at some point you will laugh anyway, so let’s control it. Humour, to me, is very important in a horror movie, but I understand that some people don’t want it there.
How do you keep the film feeling like The Evil Dead, but avoid it being formulaic?
First, you have to understand the fans. I think when you respect them very well, you know they don’t want to see a fan film. Otherwise, they can go on YouTube. They want to be surprised. They want to be shocked. As soon as I got that, I was like, I will really, really play with them. I will give them their clichés, but I will show them that I didn’t fall into cliché. I’m having a lot of fun reading comments online with fans being, ‘oh, that’s the sixth time that someone will read all the words in that fucking book’, and I’m like, just wait to see the movie and we’ll see if I’m that dumb. It’s about playing with things and understanding that there are a lot of rules and a lot of legacy. But sometimes you have to destroy that. Again, that’s something I told Sam Raimi. It’s like, I really, really respect you as a father, but as a father, I also have to kill that. It’s about respecting and destroying. Evil Dead is not about just chainsaws and blood and death, it’s much more.
