Trust the Evil Dead franchise to find more innovative ways to kill people than ever seen before. The film series returns to theatres this week as Evil Dead: Burn, the latest instalment, hits the screens. Ahead of the release, the film’s stars, Hunter Doohan, Souheila Yacoub, and Luciane Buchanan, sit down with Hindustan Times to talk about the film and their experiences working on it.
The scene that gave the actors the shivers
The Evil Dead franchise is known as much for its gore as it is for finding new, grisly ways to show death. When asked if there was a scene that gave the actors the creeps while filming it, Hunter Doohan has a carefully crafted and spoiler-free answer. “That for me that it’s was one of the first things we teased where I’m smashing something. That means when I’m crushing someone’s head with my bare hands,” says the actor.
Evil Dead Burn sees Luciane Buchanan play Thya. The trailer shows how she starts out as a normal woman, only to turn into an evil Deadite as the story progresses, hunting her own boyfriend (played by Hunter). We ask her what more fun is: playing the victim or the hunter, and she is prompt to answer, “Oh, the hunter, 100%. It’s so fun. Just teasing them and getting inside their heads was so, so fun.”
Would the actors survive a zombie apocalypse?
The film gives a fair idea of how their characters would react in battle against the dead. But how would Hunter, Luciane, and Souheila fare? Hunter feels he’d be the first to die. “I’d give up. If it’s zombie-apocalypse preparation, it’s just too much for me. I’m out,” he says with a laugh. Luciane adds, “So, we’ll sacrifice Hunter first ’cause he’s happy to go. And then we’ll (her and Souheila) talk about it, cry about it, and then probably I’ll go next.”
The technicality of the shoot
There are urban legends that when such films are shot with some element of the paranormal or the supernatural, the shoot also gets a little eerie. But the actors say this shoot was so technical that they never had the time to think about the spooky aspects. Luciane explains, “It’s planned so meticulously that it’s not scary at all. Honestly, it was like we’re in a sports team all together.”
Souheila Yacoub adds, “I remember the oner (the film’s one-shot take), for example. It was just me crawling, but at the rhythm of the scene, like pitch it up and run. I have a camera in front of me. I need to be low because of the camera, because if I go too high, they see the cable, and I need to get the right rhythm, because then they need to catch the table, but not too close to. I had thousands of stuff I needed to think of for that scene. So it was very complicated but beautiful.”
Directed and co-written by Sébastien Vaniček and produced by Rob Tapert and series creator Sam Raimi, Evil Dead: Burn arrives in theatres on July 10.