DISCLAIMER: We use Patreon so we can afford paying our writers every month for articles like this. Deep-Hell tries to use Patreon as much as possible – but we can also be found on discord at https://discord.gg/XVDyhpPV. It’s the start of the New Year, so please allow us to remind you that readers like you contribute to our continued existence.

Written by Bryn Gelbart.

Evil Dead Rise wasn’t marketed on its high concept. And let me tell you right now, it didn’t matter. Rise has become the highest grossing Evil Dead movie to date.

The term is a shorthand for an idea that can be easily communicated in a pitch. If you can sell someone on the idea in the time it takes for you to share an elevator with an exec, then it’s high concept. Does it have a quick, sexy hook? Then it’s a high concept.

The latest in the cultish horror series takes the trappings of Evil Dead and places them inside a high rise apartment building. Evil Dead (in its original iteration) traps a group of teens inside a cabin with conniving spirits. Evil Dead Rise is Evil Dead – in a single apartment. The constraints up the ante on the original concept, and allow it to be easily sold as taking X put making it modern. For an Evil Dead fan, it’s an easy pitch to get. It’s sexy and there’s a hook.

Irish filmmaker Lee Cronin’s take on the Evil Dead is the latest in the modern wave of high concept sequels. A trend in dormant or mid-tier franchise films, the high concept horror sequel can be traced back decades. But the current revival takes place in a different time for horror cinema. In the late ‘80s and 1990s studios had finally figured out how to monetize horror after decades of ignoring the genre outright. Make them quick and make them cheap — wait for profit, if it doesn’t come just try again. This is how we got to the churn-em-out method that gives us a double digit amount of sequels to Friday the 13th and Halloween. It was 1989 and every major studio treated horror movies like a 2005 Activision product.

The Friday the 13th franchise is a pretty quintessential look into my conceptualization of how the high concept sequel developed. If the only question that remained in fans minds by the end of the 1980s was where would Jason go next, this series of films answered all of those questions succinctly. Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason Goes to Hell, and perhaps the most infamous Jason X, which they shoulda just leaned in and called Jason Goes to Space.

The reason these entries still call to us is the easy shortcut to the imaginary. It’s actually quite easy to imagine what a good Friday the 13th movie in New York can look like. The title and cover art alone is more intriguing than any of the numbered Halloween sequels after Season of the Witch can muster in me. Of course, over half the movie takes place on a boat to New York City.

The failings of Jason Takes Manhattan are the type of thing that have been echoed in mainstream reviews of slashers in every era since. It is senseless and characters are one-dimensional pieces of paper mache for Jason to carve up. When the carving happens, the kills are uninspired and dull. Only one kill/fight sequence from the movie is actually memorable and it only happens once Jason reaches Manhattan in the movie’s final act.

Perhaps the most high concept horror sequels of all aren’t even horror movies; they are action. Alien vs. Predator. Freddy vs. Jason. It does not get more to the point than that. And yet, as we all know in retrospect, these films miss the point entirely.

This was a trend that came out of a demanding and untenable release landscape. It was an attempt to make your movie stand out in years like 1989, where there were also Friday the 13th and Halloween sequels hitting theaters later that year.

In the ensuing decades, horror in cinema has since deflated and been born again. And so  I present to you two other examples released in the last twelve months as sufficient evidence that I’m not entirely full of shit; Scream IV: Ghostface Takes Manhattan and Prey (or Predator 1719).

Predator might not be a horror movie but it is a slasher – a subgenre whose propensity for churning out sequels found itself quickly turning to the high concept. It’s funny then, that Prey is only the fifth Predator movie since the 1987 debut. In terms of release cadence, Predator is sitting next to the other dormant ‘80s action franchises. John McClaine spins his wheels while Indiana Jones gives it one last doomed college try.

Whether or not Predator succeeded because of Schwarzenneger, what carried the franchise forward was the monster – not the hero. That, in and of itself, is a horror genre choice.

This can be credited partially to the film poking holes in the facade of machismo its characters emanate. Still, McTiernan would visit these themes again a year later. And Die Hard is more immediately identifiable by its lead character more than any of its contemporaries, save perhaps Rambo. No, there is something to Predator intentionally bending its genre that none of the sequels captured. Until Prey.

The film is high concept. What if Predator, but set in 1700’s America? Comanche vs Predator. Prey is the idea and dynamics of the first Predator transposed both backwards and forward in time. We go literally back to the midwestern plains of 1719 but director Dan Trachtenberg choosing to focus the narrative on a young woman of color isn’t lost on anyone. And like Schwarzenegger’s Dutch, Midthunder’s Naru has internal conflict driven by identity. There is something the world wants from them, expects from them, and they reject it. Naru is a character that would not exist in an ‘80s movie, but her pushing against gender roles in her community is in direct conversation with McTiernan’s homoerotic subtext.

That’s why Prey is a good film, but not necessarily why it caught on. Immediately after it dropped on Hulu, hyped up fans began pitching concepts for more sequels like baked teenagers hypothesizing about the next Assassin’s Creed. Yeah man, what if the next Predator was set in Feudal Japan? Even websites like Den of Geek commissioned a think piece on how Prey was a new formula. Plug and play, baby.

Prey works as well as it does because of an understanding of the source in a way that is deeper than iconography. The iconography is there, like in any good slasher, but its excellent use of the Predator’s toolkit is not what made Prey successful. It was the way it opened up Predator to become part of a formula. Fans want more interesting sequels to their old favorites, sure I can buy that, but I also wonder if this is more indicative of what these people might actually want — a content pipeline.

Enter Scream, a franchise on its second entry in a newly rebooted series of sequels. To shield the blow from the loss of iconic final girl Sydney Prescott by way of Neve Campbell’s step back from the franchise, Scream IV went high concept. Let’s take Scream where it’s never been. New York City.

As established, taking an established horror formula and moving it to NYC is a good idea. Like Jason Takes Manhattan, there is one good subway sequence in Scream VI. But where the latest Scream gets lost is the same place as the 8th Friday – its sequelitis. Tied down to its legacy characters and the Craven tradition of satirizing and dissecting modern horror trends, there is simply too much going on for Scream IV to also be a New York movie. It doesn’t feel like a city movie. Not in the way Evil Dead Rise does.

Evil Dead isn’t as tapped out as Halloween or Friday, but three of the four up to this point have been cabin in the woods movies. More so than taking the lore heavy meta-slasher to a big city, Evil Dead is a natural fit for the switch to urban horror.

Evil Dead Rise forces itself a bit to conform to series conventions too much in its set up. Instead of a group of friends in a cabin, we have a family in an apartment. This is great. Beth, recently pregnant, comes to visit her sister Ellie, who has three children — two queer coded teens and one young daughter. It’s easy to see early on what the thematic meat is going to be. What is entertaining are the ways the family is literally torn apart by the Deadites. But to get there, the contrivances need to stack up.

The kids find the Necronomicon in the basement garage, after an earthquake (or is it an evil force of nature luring them in) cracks the ground open. It’s fine and it’s quick. There is a genuine urban terror of not knowing the history of your building or what once lurked there. Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise doesn’t tap into that, instead faithfully retreading the steps. In this way, it’s a modern franchise sequel through and through.

By the time 90 minutes is up, it’s go time and iconography begins dropping out of the sky. A shotgun and a chainsaw. All the puzzle pieces are there to turn Beth into Ash, except maybe the most important one — the Campbell of it all. And so, reasonably, Rise lets off the sequel gas right as it’s about to go full gore. The film is better for it.

Lilly Sullivan’s Beth is not the flippant savior. She is, instead, the axis from which all of the film’s horror spins out from.

All the fears and anxieties Beth has about motherhood are played out in terrifying reality before her eyes. First, there is Ellie as embodiment of the bad mother — the mother who has failed. This fear is the one Rise is the best at encapsulating. Beth’s sister is at first the platonic ideal of a loving hands-on, yet laid-back, mom. But the relationship between the two is always based on fear. Ellie’s character is the fear that Beth will never live up to her sister as a mother. That anxiety is then twisted to create an even worse what if. What if she is as bad as her sister, or somehow even worse?

The film never actually implies Ellie was a bad mother, but it can’t help but be felt in a quasi-conservative way. She is a single mother, raising two gender nonconforming kids, and she’s a goddamn tattoo artist — the most liberal profession of them all. And on the surface, Ellie holds it all together and makes it work; she is cool and good, as it turns out. Her demonic turn suggests otherwise.

If the horror is stripping away the artifice to reveal the emotional realities beneath, as it tends to do, then we have to ask if Ellie was a good mother on the surface, what makes her bad deep down? Is it the freedom she’s allowed her children in exploring their identities? She takes a laissez faire attitude toward parenting, which is easy to immediately read as being the “cool mom.” Beth certainly sees her sister this way at the onset. But the cool, liberal tattooed mother isn’t perfect. At very least, she doesn’t teach her kids not to fuck with evil books, and it winds up being her family’s downfall.

A tangible effect to the film’s breakdown of the cool liberal single mother is its abrasive attitude towards child violence. Perhaps another reason why Evil Dead Rise never rings too false, despite being a movie about motherhood written by a man, is how much it is willing to fuck these kids up. And in delivering the shocks Evil Dead fans are looking for, Rise drives another specific fear about having children home. There are some things you can’t save them from.

The last literalization of the themes manifest when Deadite-possessed Ellie learns about Beth’s pregnancy and tries to rip the fetus from her. A fear of losing before you’ve even begun. Two of the three kids die, leaving Beth as a de facto mother to the youngest after the movie’s gory climax takes its toll.

Each swing from these legacy slashers feels like a last grasp for relevance. It’s not 1989 and there isn’t a guaranteed attempt next year or ever. Rise and Prey were hits. But they feel like fragile victories for a shrinking group of horror fans.  Even after two successful entries in a row, a flop next time around would tank the Scream franchise for another decade. The stakes have been raised, but so have the budgets and ambitions.

It benefits Hollywood for you to think that Jordan Peele and Ari Aster were the first filmmakers to say something profound in a horror movie. Slashers became pointless cash grabs, so they were always pointless. Then after that there was torture porn. Now finally, the “artful” horror has arrived. It wants you to feel the same way about action movies too, now that I think about it.

We know this is bullshit. It’s nice to see directors like Cronin and Trachtenberg remind us that the artistry of Evil Dead and the depth Predator were not lost on the children of that generation. That horror stories can have legacies that extend beyond a mask and a machete.

sources: https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3761200/evil-dead-rise-has-officially-hit-100-million-at-the-worldwide-box-office/ – For as much as that’s worth. Personally I’d call having a series of career and genre defining budget cult hits an infinitesimally bigger success than making $100 million dollars on a franchise movie.
Dir. John McTiernan – https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001532/
https://www.piratesandprincesses.net/fan-pitch-for-a-predator-film-goes-viral-online/
https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/prey-revealed-the-perfect-template-for-future-predator-movies/
https://decider.com/2022/08/09/hulu-claims-prey-biggest-premiere-ever/