Evil Dead Rise Image Shows First Look At Main Cast

A new first-look image from Evil Dead Rise shows off the main cast of the horror sequel. The Evil Dead franchise began in 1981 with Sam Raimi’s breakthrough film The Evil Dead, which followed a group of young adults being beset by Candarian demons in a cabin in the woods and spawned an increasingly slapstick-heavy trilogy that ran through 1992’s Army of Darkness. The film received an unrelated remake in 2013 before original star Bruce Campbell returned as his character Ash Williams in the Starz series Ash vs. Evil Dead, which ran from 2015 to 2018. Then the franchise went dormant again until now, as Evil Dead Rise prepares to debut in theaters on April 21, 2023.

On his official Twitter account, Campbell, who is executive producing Evil Dead Rise alongside original Evil Dead director Sam Raimi, shared an update following his personal film festival BruceFest. During the festival, he shared a brand-new first-look image from the film, but he followed that up by sharing the image on Twitter. The image reveals the family that will be at the center of the film, nervously looking at a drooling figure who appears to be tied up in the foreground. Campbell teased that audiences can “see them come together or be torn apart.” Check out the full-size image below:

Everything We Know About Evil Dead Rise

With Sam Raimi remaining only in a producer capacity, the reins of Evil Dead Rise have been handed to Lee Cronin, the Irish director behind 2019’s The Hole in the Ground. The cast, as shown in the image above, includes Alyssa Sutherland as mother of three Ellie and Lily Sullivan as her sister Beth. The rest of the ensemble includes Ali Asghar Shah, Gabrielle Echols, Morgan Davies, Nell Fisher, Mia Challis, Tai Wano, Jayden Daniels, and Billy Reynolds-McCarthy. So far, there doesn’t seem to be any casting overlap with any previous Evil Dead projects.

The film will follow the events that unravel when Lily comes to visit Ellie in her tiny Los Angeles apartment. When a mysterious and powerful book (presumably either The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2013’s Naturom Demonto or Evil Dead II‘s Necronomicon Ex-Mortis) is discovered deep in the building, the siblings accidentally unleash demons hellbent on possessing human bodies. Beth must fight to protect the children from all-out bloody mayhem, as the first-look image reveals that the first victim of the demons is most likely their mother.

The degree to which Evil Dead Rise is going to be a sequel, reboot, or the increasingly popular “re-quel” is currently unknown. So far, the film appears to be telling a self-contained story within the overall Evil Dead Universe rather than following a specific throughline. However, more details will rise when the trailer for the film is released, which may offer more insight for eagle-eyed fans trying to discern whether this film exists specifically within the Ash Williams Evil Dead branch or the remake storyline, which centered on Jane Levy’s Mia Allen.