MOVIE NEWS – Bruce Campbell won’t be starring in Evil Dead Rise, but he’s already revealed what to expect when it arrives on HBO Max in 2022.

Though an inescapable part of Bruce Campbell’s oeuvre, it’s been almost a decade since the last Evil Dead movie rebooted the franchise, with plenty of blood but very little of the black humour that was the hallmark of the earlier films and the Ash vs Evil Dead TV series. Now, Lee Cronin’s upcoming Evil Dead Rise brings the dead back to life, this time in an urban tenement with an all-new cast. Still, some familiar names are working behind the scenes, in the form of original Evil Dead creator Sam Raimi and lead actor Bruce Campbell, who has already given us a taste of the tone of the upcoming film.

In an interview with BlairWitch.de, Campbell gave a lengthy rundown of what Evil Dead fans can expect from the latest rocking horror in a series that began over 40 years ago. Campbell will be involved as a producer on this one but will not be appearing in the film, has reportedly hung up his Ash Williams boots after the conclusion of the Ash vs Evil Dead series.

“[The movie] will be different; it’s a dark movie and it’s quite serious,” Bruce Campbell told the site.

“Good, strong performances. It’s about a single mother who now has to deal with this book [of the dead]. These days it’s more about the book. The book goes round and round… it gets passed around, it gets passed on. People try to get rid of it, try to bury it or destroy it, but they don’t really succeed. So this book just keeps popping up. It’s really just another story about what happens when this book shows up in the lives of a certain group of people and how it intersects.”

Campbell continued, “Lee Cronin is a very serious man. Lee Cronin is a very serious director. A very atmospheric director. He’s going to be very good. We’ve already seen a rough [cut] of it. It has all the ingredients we need, it just needs… like anything… tightening up. But we’re in good shape. We’ve given it a lot of creative leeway. The basics remain the same. The book, the possession, the rules on how to get rid of them. Every new hero or heroine has to learn how to drive out evil.”

“This family is not the same at the end of the film. They are gutted. The whole family is destroyed. These people are possessed – brothers, sisters, sons, daughters. It’s a family affair. They are all related in this. I think it makes it even harder to occupy and kill brothers and sisters and things like that.”

The official synopsis for Evil Dead Rise reads, “In the fifth Evil Dead film, road-weary Beth visits her older sister Ellie, who is raising her three children alone in a cramped Los Angeles apartment. The siblings’ reunion is interrupted by the discovery of a mysterious book in the depths of Ellie’s house, which gives birth to flesh-and-blood demons and plunges Beth into an ancient struggle for survival as she faces the most terrifying version of motherhood imaginable.”.

While it sounds from Bruce Campbell’s review that the new film could take the franchise even further away from the black humour of the original film series, before we comment, it will be worth waiting until the movie comes out on HBO Max, sometime next year.

Source: BlairWitch.de