The Evil Dead Rise Trailer Is A Reminder That Cheese Graters Are Utterly Terrifying
Hail, hail! The "Evil Dead" franchise is back with a new feature film, to the feverish excitement of fans worldwide. A fresh trailer for the franchise's fifth entry dropped this week and "Evil Dead Rise" appears to be everything a horror head could hope for. Check it out here, with a fair warning for gore.
"Witness the mother of all evil," a tagline reads, in "Evil Dead Rise," the latest installment in the Sam Raimi-borne horror franchise. As with most "Dead" stories, this one centers around people who stumble upon an ancient book of the dead — the Necronomicon — and unwelcome houseguests emerging from it. Ever raising the stakes (and buckets of blood) in each entry, this "Evil Dead" throws children into the mix, the youngest a cherubic girl (Nell Fisher) who can't be older than 10, who gets to hear things like "Mommy's with the maggots now."
Lee Cronin ("The Hole in the Ground") steers the franchise ship from the sticks and into the big city, following estranged sisters Beth and Ellie (Lily Sullivan and Alyssa Sutherland) as they reunite in the latter's Los Angeles apartment. While the first two Raimi-created films are famously set in a cabin in the woods, "Rise" finds isolation (one of horror's most necessary elements) in one of the nation's most populous cities, albeit in basements and dim hallways. It looks like a mean movie, more sinister than the sequels "Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn" and Yankee-in-medieval-times extravaganza "Army of Darkness" and closer in tone to the gnarly Fede Álvarez re-imagining of "Evil Dead" in 2013. Glass pokes through the throat as it's voluntarily swallowed, a child gets an extreme close-up view of an active tattoo needle, and a woman scalps another with her bare hands.
But the most sensational violence in the trailer uses a common kitchen item: the cheese grater.
Goodnight mommy
The trailer is a treat of sight and sound: to the bittersweet tunes of "Que Sera, Sera" (which recalls an entirely different mother-child dynamic in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much"), a group of siblings rally to survive the night. Mommy Ellie acts as anyone does when possessed by a parasitic demon: pupils shrink to pinpricks, her skin goes ashen and begins to rot, she shambles like her muscles are an ill-fitting suit.
Once its principal players open the ancient flesh-bound book and commit the cardinal horror movie sin of reading the Latin aloud, the capitalized Evil arrives, and one of its greatest parlor tricks is to use common items to inflict as much suffering as possible in unique acts of ultraviolence. In "Evil Dead" '81, a pencil carves through a woman's ankle, while the 2013 reboot went all out with nail guns, bathroom porcelain, and an electric carving knife — not to mention Bruce Campbell's chainsaw cutting a swath through the sequels.
Lee's iteration has one poor soul taking an injury from, of all things, a cheese grater. Second only to the garbage disposal-hand pulverizer in the top 10 all-time kitchen nightmares, the grater is one of the more underused weapons in horror movies even though every home cook has gotten awfully close to (or has succeeded in) shaving off a fingertip on those sharp, rounded edges, and the average person could easily imagine the sound and feel of its bladed contours getting to know human skin. "Rise" isn't the first to use such a grating weapon; George Bessudo's 2008 thriller "Farmhouse" features torture-by-grater, with a bound woman taking several robust scrapes to the knee. But without Deadites, children in peril, or chainsaws, it's sure to pale in comparison to "Evil Dead Rise" and further expansions.