In a recent interview with AL.com, franchise star and producer Bruce Campbell has shared new details on the upcoming fifth installment of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films, confirming that director Lee Cronin has completed his screenplay for Evil Dead Rise, describing it as a “modern-day urban Evil Dead.” He also revealed that they’ve already talked to a couple of potential partners and is hoping to start production next year.
“We’re honing-in, circling the building now trying to lock in a partner,” Campbell said. “We have a couple of bidders and we’re trying to just find the correct suitor and we have a script written and a director picked. Sam Raimi hand-picked a guy named Lee Cronin, who’s a very good Irish filmmaker. And it’s got a very good modern tale. It’s a modern-day urban “Evil Dead,” it’s called “Evil Dead Rise.” And we’re hoping to do that next year.”
He also went on to provide a brief description of the film’s female heroine. “What we’re doing now is we’re saying, Look, this is another ‘Evil Dead’ movie and that book gets around, a lot of people run into it and it’s another story,” Campbell continued. “The main key with “Evil Dead” is they’re just regular people who are battling what seems to be a very unstoppable evil, and so that’s where the horror comes from. It’s not someone who’s skilled. They’re not fighting a soldier. They’re not fighting a scientist. They’re not fighting anybody more than your average neighbor. This one is going to be a similar thing. We’re going to have a heroine, a woman in charge, and she’s going to try and save her family.”
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The next installment to the Evil Dead films will be written and directed by The Hole In The Ground filmmaker Lee Cronin, who was handpicked by franchise creator Sam Raimi. Campbell previously confirmed that the upcoming film won’t have any ties to the previous films and might again feature a female lead.
The Evil Dead franchise began with 1981’s The Evil Dead and was followed by 1987’s Evil Dead II and 1993’s Army of Darkness which were all written and directed by Sam Raimi and centered on Bruce Campbell’s Ash Williams. The original trilogy had amassed a massive cult following that spawn into video games, stage musicals, and a comedy horror series titled Ash vs. Evil Dead which ran on-air from 2015-2018. In 2013, the fourth installment to film franchise was introduced with Fede Alvarez’s 2013 soft reboot of Raimi’s 1981 film which now revolves around a female protagonist.
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Lee Cronin is an Irish filmmaker who made his feature-length directorial debut last year with the supernatural horror film The Hole in the Ground. He also recently collaborated with Raimi as he directed an episode of Quibi’s horror anthology series 50 States of Fright.
