Warning! This article contains Evil Dead Rise spoilers. Turn back if you want to avoid spoilers.
The fact that Evil Dead Rise is an incredibly bloody gorefest is not surprising. As is typical of this long-running series, very few characters survive. When writing the script, director Lee Cronin let his imagination run wild, but there were a couple of lines he figured he shouldn’t cross – and one of them was killing the cat.
In an interview with Total Film & GamesRadar+ the filmmaker revealed earlier versions of this film weren’t as forgiving towards the cat, whose air duct-scampering off-screen behavior is mentioned early in the final version. The filmmaker revealed that earlier versions of the film were not so forgiving to the feline, whose off-screen, air duct-scampering antics are mentioned early on in final cut.
It is written. You can see it. [Ellie] Crawling through the [vent] Cronin says, “She’s just finishing off the cat by swallowing its tail.” “Then… but our budget would never allow this…” I wanted – you know the hatch that opens in the back of Danny’s bedroom – I wanted Kassie and Beth to escape that way. Then, just when you think that things are safe, they run into a deadite feline.
“I’ve finally learned that people hate you if anything is done to animals. It’s enough to turn people off your film. Someone asked a question in a Q&A the other night and they cheered when I said the cat survived. The audience cheered. I chose to use the image of the cat running out just to emphasize that the cat got out.”
Lily Sullivan (Alyssa Sullivan) and Alyssa Sullivan (Lily Sullivan) star in Evil Dead Rise. Their strained relationships are strained to the limit when Danny (Morgan Davies), Bridget(Gabrielle Echols), Kassie(Nell Fisher), Danny’s children, find a mysterious novel hidden under their Los Angeles highrise.
Unaware of the dark origins of their discoveries, the youngsters ferry them back up to their apartment – and inadvertently unleash an all-powerful demon that takes up residence in their mother’s body. Beth, who has just learned that she is pregnant, now finds herself in a terrifying situation where she must keep her nieces safe for 12 hours.
Bridget, the first child, turns to Ellie before Danny succumbs. This is because the entity causing the family to murder and torture everyone in their path has been causing them to do so. Knowing the Evil Dead series’ tradition of typically having only one hero standing at the end, who would’ve presumably always been Beth, we asked Cronin whether or not he ever dared to consider offing nine-year-old Kassie as well.
“I suppose so, since when I start to develop something I won’t close any avenue. I won’t say, ‘I definitely will not do that.’ I will let the themes and story guide my choices. He explains that he always tries to be in tune with what he is writing.
“With this one because of the metaphor, and Beth taking on the mantle I was like ‘I suppose one of the children has to survive. If I dig through my drafts, was Kassie’s demise ever written anywhere? Strangely, with an Evil Dead flick you can’t get too far. But I think it would have been distasteful,” Cronin explains. “I think people would have been turned off in some way.” Already, there’s pain in that family.
“I knew that from the very beginning, I wanted Beth out. A family cannot be just one person. A family must have at least two members and there is a bit of hope in the ending because, although families are destroyed by many bad things, such as death, trauma, circumstance, etc., they can still survive. “I wanted to give the audience a little hope with the survivors.”
Evil Dead Rise is now in UK cinemas and US theaters. Visit our interviews with Alyssa Sullivan & Lily Sullivan for more details on the film, or read our spoiler-free interview with Lee Cronin.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72358472/ss_1591f088d015065131c685073afa569de9bf80af.0.jpg "Homebody is a classic survival game from the Game Grumps studio 21")
