To do so, he’s relocated the action to an urban domestic setting in a run-down Los Angeles apartment building. Rather than teens, it’s a family reunion between Beth (Lily Sullivan), who travels with a band and doesn’t have her life together, and sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), a newly single cool mom to three kids (Morgan Davis, Gabrielle Echols, Nelle Fisher). Of course, there’s the evil force waiting to be discovered in a vault and a book bound in human skin that unleashes a whole lot of hell.
“I think placing
horror in recognizable domestic circumstances is often a really great shortcut to connect with an audience, and I thought it’d be very interesting if we could take the malevolence of the Deadites into the city,” Cronin says. “Sam, Rob, and Bruce, being the protectors of all that is
Evil Dead, were on board instantly and liked taking it into that space.”
Even if the cabin is mostly absent from this story,
Rise fits within the series continuity. Cronin points to the scene in
Army of Darkness when Ash encounters three books bound in flesh. That stuck with him, and he wrote with the idea that all three—the
Naturom Demonto, Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, and simply the
Book of the Dead in
Rise—exist in the same universe. There’s one in Raimi’s world, another in Alvarez’s, and a third here. “They might have slightly different edges to them in terms of what they can do, and there’s a little subtle change or two to the incantations,” Cronin says.
Rise’s Book of the Dead is a “bastard cousin” to the others, with Celtic influences, Cronenbergian sketches, sharp teeth, and veins. This book also creates a pathway to “open up the door for more
Evil Dead stories moving forward by changing it up.”