AUSTIN, Texas — You can’t keep a Deadite down. While horror films aren’t a sure thing at the box office, recent returns have been promising. Just a little over a week ago, “Scream VI” topped the box office with a franchise-best $44.5 million in domestic ticket sales.

Few horror franchises are as beloved by fans as “Evil Dead,” and the latest installment, “Evil Dead Rise,” premiered at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas, March 15 as part of the South by Southwest Conference & Festivals.

Just a few hours prior to the premiere, producers and series creators Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and Bruce Campbell were joined by director Lee Cronin and actors Alyssa Sutherland and Lily Sullivan at a panel called “Evil Dead Rise: Flesh-Possessing Demons Come Home.”

The “Evil Dead” series, which is not for the faint of heart, stretches back to the early ‘80s and now includes five feature films, a three-season television series and many video games.

It’s a tale as old as time. Parasitic demons given license to possess the living via blood-inked incantations in an ancient book bound in human flesh run amok in a Los Angeles high-rise apartment building. 

If you’re concerned, none of the “Evil Dead Rise” spoiler talk is included here.

The Longevity of Evil Dead

The series has been around for 40 years. The latest installment moves the horror away from a cabin in the woods and is the first feature film in the series since 2013. Producer and original “Evil Dead” writer and director Raimi said the series’ longevity comes down to entertainment value.  

“I think the ‘Evil Dead’ has survived for so long because it’s about the filmmakers’ love of entertaining the audience, whether it’s comedy or adventure or horror to the extreme,” he said. “It’s always about the fans’ participation. The filmmakers seem to leave a lot of dark space in the frame, seeds for the audience’s imagination. And I think that’s what makes it evergreen, is that they allow the audience to provide some of the horror. The filmmakers leave room, especially for the audience’s imagination. Because they’re such a willing and generous contributor to the horror, it seems like it’s able to live a lot longer than other types of films where they show you everything.”

Ash Williams

Campbell, a B-movie icon who remains best known for portraying the original chainsaw-wielding “Evil Dead” protagonist Ash Williams, spoke at length about the character that defined his career. 

“Well, I can speak mostly from my own experience with the Ash character. Ash has no skills whatsoever. So the people in the audience go, ‘I could do that.’ So they keep watching to see if he’s going to get any smarter or better, and he kind of does it,” Campbell said.

Character Inspiration

The panel used a Q&A format, and one of the more interesting questions for the actors was about inspiration from other films. 

“For me, I think being in the ‘Evil Dead’ film, it’s so messy, extreme, you act out the most absurd situations. So I think Lori Petty in ‘Tank Girl’ and Toni Collette in ‘Hereditary,’ which was just like the uglier, the better; the weirder, the more wonderful – which is what I think the ‘Evil Dead’ world gives you,” Sullivan said.

Sutherland drew inspiration from an unlikely source.

“I have an obscure one for this. There was something in my gut telling me I have to watch ‘The Mask,’” she said. “There was something about the enhancement that happened when Jim Carrey put on this ancient mask. And I was like, ‘How old is this book? How long has this evil force been tied to this book without having a human to embody?’ I loved the joy of ‘The Mask.’ There has to be rage in the Deadite to be scary, but also the joy and the celebration of carnage. And that gave me both joy and rage, and I could do everything in between.”

Transitioning From Shorts to Features

Cronin, an Irish filmmaker, got his start in short films. Prior to “Evil Dead Rise,” he directed and co-wrote 2019’s feature-length “The Hole in the Ground.”

“It’s a slow journey. There’s nothing slower than trying to get out of the world of making short films — which is wonderful — and getting your first feature film made,” he said. “You look back and account for all of this time and you don’t know where it’s gone. But I think with short films I was quite specific and precise about what I wanted to do, and I didn’t want to do a lot of them; I wanted to do them to a high standard, as best I could.”

Creating Scare Sequences

What’s scary is subjective, but Raimi has successfully frightened audiences for years. For him, the scares come from audiences identifying with the characters and a good dose of sleight of hand.

“Usually I want to make sure I know what the main character wants. They need this, and the more you can connect the audience with that main character on their journey — whether it’s to survive or reach the end of a hallway or get to the weapon, whatever it is — you want to know how desperate that person wants so you can connect with them. And every obstacle in their way creates conflict, drama,” Raimi said. “The more you can connect with that person, the stronger it’s gonna be. And then I try to be aware of the manipulation. The audience is aware that this is a game on some level as they’re watching the movie. In the back of their mind they know it’s a sleight of hand show. I’m aware of the rhythms of it and try to vary them up and surprise the audience.”

Living with Ash

Campbell said he retired from playing Ash after the third season of “Ash vs Evil Dead” aired on Starz. For him, the series was a chance to fix some of what he didn’t like in the first three “Evil Dead” films.  

“I did ‘Ash vs Evil Dead’ the TV show so I could go back like George Lucas and fix some (expletive) with that character,” he said. “It was an opportunity to go back as an adult actor, because the irony in my life is I’m best known for the thing that I was least qualified for — which was starring in the first ‘Evil Dead’ movie.

Brutal Filmmaking

The “Evil Dead” films are notoriously difficult to shoot and hard on the actors. There’s an entire book devoted to the creation of the first three movies.

“No one makes a harder movie to make than an ‘Evil Dead’ movie. I have zero sympathy for any actor on any movie ever. I don’t want to hear your problems. But it was fun to do that because I felt that it was warranted,” Campbell said.

Evil Dead Legacy

A generation of fans grew up watching the first three films on VHS in the ‘80s and ‘90s.  

“[It’s] very personal for me, actually, the ‘Evil Dead.’ It was quite inspiring in my childhood,” Cronin said. “It was actually my dad showed me ‘Evil Dead’ and ‘Evil Dead II’ back-to-back on VHS when I was about 8 years old. I had no idea what I was watching, but I knew it was important. It made a massive impression.”

From Cabin to High-Rise

“I’m really drawn to horror in domestic circumstances. I think it’s the easiest cheat sheet and shortcut to engage the audience is to bring them to somewhere familiar. I knew I wanted to take it to an urban place. The guys all wanted something new. I needed to do something kind of new. It felt automatic for me to explore family, and I felt that it would be really good to put kids against Deadites. Home is where the horror is.”

“Evil Dead Rise” is scheduled to be released in the U.S. on April 21.