The director of Evil Dead Rise teases how the film’s new Necronomicon Ex-Mortis ties to the rest of the franchise. The film is the fifth theatrical outing in the Evil Dead series, which began in 1981 and spawned a trilogy starring Bruce Campbell as chainsaw-wielding hero Ashley J. Williams that ran until 1993’s Army of Darkness. That film was followed by a remake starring Jane Levy in 2013 before Campbell returned for a three-season TV series on Starz titled Ash vs. Evil Dead. Evil Dead Rise, which is due in theaters on April 21, will be largely unrelated to any established characters, following a family being torn asunder by demonic possession in an L.A. apartment building.
Empire recently had the opportunity to sit down and discuss the recent Evil Dead Rise trailer with director Lee Cronin. During the conversation, they discussed the fact that there is a new design for the franchise’s central Book of the Dead, the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis. He revealed that, while every film in the franchise has its own design for the book, he specifically told original trilogy director Sam Raimi that he wanted his film to use the only unused copy of the Necronomicon of the three seen in Army of Darkness, saying that the books “all have slightly different personalities.” Read his full quote below:
In one of the early meetings I had with Sam Raimi, I said, “You know the way in Army Of Darkness, there’s three [Necronomicons]? You had one, [Evil Dead 2013 director] Fede [Alvarez] had one, I’m going to take the other one.”
It gave me that platform to nudge things forward, and also to showcase that we live in a world where there is more than one copy of the Necronomicon. Those books may all have slightly different personalities – it’s not exactly the same book, necessarily, that Ash had in the cabin. But it’s very, very firmly related. It could even be more dangerous…
The Evil Dead Movies Have Always Had a Loose Continuity
Given the complicated and frequently confusing chronology of the Evil Dead franchise, many fans have wondered what version of the universe Evil Dead Rise takes place in. While Campbell did make a brief appearance in a disconnected post-credits moment of the 2013 remake, that film largely presented a different version of the cosmology of the demonic entities than the original trilogy. While the new film seems to take after the remake in terms of its intense violence, the look of the Necronomicon and the way it is activated seem to hew closer to the original films.
However, parsing between the remake and the original trilogy isn’t a clean and simple task in and of itself. The 1981 original The Evil Dead doesn’t actually feature the Necronomicon at all, instead showcasing the book known as the Naturom Demonto, the book that was also featured in the 2013 remake. In fact, it has been argued that each film in the original trilogy essentially reboots the previous one, using elements of the preceding story as inspiration for a brand new backstory for Ash.
Many other iconic elements of the Evil Dead franchise have been similarly retooled or retconned over the years. For instance, the fact that Ash works at a department store called S-Mart wasn’t introduced until Army of Darkness, though that fact carried over into Ash vs. Evil Dead. Given the inherent looseness of the franchise’s universe, Evil Dead Rise has much more flexibility when it comes to the canon, though fans will be gratified to learn Cronin’s intention to directly utilize the Army of Darkness mythology even while taking the story in a slightly different direction.
Key Release Dates
Evil Dead Rise
Release Date:2023-04-21
