‘Evil Dead Burn’s Best Scene Is The Perfect Connection To ‘Evil Dead Rise’
Evil Dead Burn (2026) continues the Evil Dead franchise in a big way, expanding on the lore and giving us some of the cruelest versions of Deadites yet. However, it's also a very centralized sequel with next to no connections to what came before, save for two scenes.
The scariest scene in the film not only set the entire story in motion, but it also gave us a hard confirmation of how this film connects to Evil Dead Rise (2023). Even still, it's hard to think about the connective aspects of the scene because we are too busy watching in horror at the terror that unfolds.
‘Evil Dead Burn’s Opening Scene Is One of the Series' Best
When we begin Evil Dead Burn, we are introduced to two friends who are out fishing in a lake. We don't think much of it until one of the friends' girlfriends keeps calling because she's worried that the lake is haunted. Fishing on the dock, everything seems fine until one fishing reel gets yanked into the lake and the other reels in a head.
The head in question may be decomposing, but the fact that it's scalped confirms to us that this was the head of the girl in Evil Dead Rise. Quickly, the hooks dig into the man and pull him into the lake, and when the friend sees him, he tries to help him. Thinking he got him out of the water, we see he only got the top half of him.
Jessica, the Deadite at the start of Evil Dead Rise, appears and flips his boat. Then, standing on it in the rain, she heats up the water and cooks the man. As he crawls to shore and dies, Jessica walks past him, stepping on his hand and degloving it in the process, and gives us the darkest opening of the series.
Recent ‘Evil Dead’ Films Have Had Great Opening Scenes
Evil Dead Burn has one of the grimmest openings, but it's the third in a line of iconic openings the series has introduced, with this one being the first to help us connect one film to another. It feels like the dark side of what Evil Dead Rise did as well, continuing the story and showing how the evil within Jessica festered in that time.
Evil Dead Rise started with a young girl acting sick in bed as her friend stayed with her to see how she was. Instead, Jessica went full Deadite and scalped her, then beheaded her boyfriend and used his drone to cut her face. As she rose from the water to form the title screen, it made a huge statement for Cronin's film. We just didn't expect her to stay in that lake for as long as she did.
Evil Dead (2013) also had a dark opening as a young girl is trapped and tied to a post in a basement. As we see her doused in gas, we think she's a victim, but she's actually a Deadite that has to be burned alive. As she curses at her father, he blows off her head with a shotgun, and the title screen comes up. Evil Dead has always had wild openings for its modern films, and it's great to see the trend continue.
‘Evil Dead Burn’s Opening Isn't the Only Connection to ‘Evil Dead Rise’
Evil Dead Burn did a great job of ensuring that it has ties to Evil Dead Rise without any room for debate, but the second after-credits scene doubled down even more with the shocking return of Ellie Bixler as the maternal Deadite from the last film.
While her return is a bit random in the larger narrative, there's no denying she helped keep the franchise alive, and seeing her act unhinged again is something that fans will never get tired of. Not since the Sam Raimi movies have we seen the Evil Dead films act so connected to one another, but Evil Dead Burn does so in a way that doesn't harm the overall impact of the story.
As a result, we can enjoy it without wondering if it "matters" in the larger context. More than that, we can get a better understanding of what happened after the events of Evil Dead Rise.
