Welcome back to Behind The Scenes Saturday!! I’m sorry I haven’t posted one of these in a while, but I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired. Today is dedicated to one of my go-to horror movies, Evil Dead Rise! With its combination of scares, laughs, and shocks, this film became an instant favorite of mine. So, be sure to keep the door locked, don’t turn your back on a dead body, and enjoy these fun pictures and bits of trivia!!

(Trivia provided by IMDb.com)

(Pictures provided by google.com and IMDb.com)

(WARNING!! VERY GRAPHIC SPECIAL EFFECTS!!!)

(SPOILER ALERT!!!)

• The film’s director, Lee Cronin stated that at least 6,500 liters of fake blood was used for the movie.
• The film was originally going to be exclusively released on HBO Max, but it performed so strongly during test screenings, that the studio decided to release it in theaters first.

• The pizza place that the kids go to was called Henrietta’s. This is a reference to Henrietta Knowby (Lou Hancock), the possessed woman in the basement in Evil Dead II.
• During the first scene in the film, you might notice the clock on the wall inside Jessica’s (Anna-Maree Thomas) cabin. It’s the exact same clock that Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) draws in the first Evil Dead film.

• To prepare for her possessed personality, Alyssa Sutherland (Ellie) took inspiration from Jim Carrey’s performance in The Mask.
• The film was shot in chronological order.

• The film opens with the same sound of a fly buzzing around that appeared in the previous installments.
• Lee Cronin confirmed that all of the characters in the film were named after actors who previously appeared in the franchise.

• On Ellie’s arms, there are tattoos of vines that wrap around them. This is a nod to Cheryl in The Evil Dead, Bobby Joe (Kassie Wesley DePaiva) from Evil Dead II, and Mia (Jane Levy) from Evil Dead, who were all bound and attacked by vines.
• This is the only film in the franchise that doesn’t feature the classic 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale vehicle. Although the car doesn’t appear in the film, the chainsaw that Beth (Lily Sullivan) uses is the exact same color as it.

• Lee Cronin stated that the building the film is set in was named The Monde, which is an anagram of “Demon.”
• Shooting of the film was short and fast due to the team working extra hard on the weekends to get the job done. Senior prosthetic artist, Tristan Lucas stated, “It was a crazy schedule. Long days, long weeks, and lots of working on the weekend at the workshop to get stuff done. We try to accommodate as much as we can. There’s not much we’ll have said no to. Our head of department, prosthetics designer, Luke Polti, has always reinforced the idea it’s our job to get what they want on the screen. As long as we’re not killing ourselves or working for free, we should do what we can to get it done in a healthy way.”

• Mark Mitchinson (Mr. Fonda) also appeared in Ash vs. Evil Dead as Crosby, the leader of a militia that Ash’s crew crosses paths with. Mitchinson was also the voice of the priest (Marcus Littleton) in the Book Of The Dead recordings that Danny (Morgan Davies) found in this film.
• Lily Sullivan based her character’s voice on Milla Jovovich’s.

• Kassie’s (Nell Fisher) creation, Staffanie was a throwback to the dagger with the skull on the handle that was used in the first two Evil Dead films. Like the dagger, Staffanie was used optimistically, but it was ultimately ineffective.
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë was read by Teresa (Mirabai Pease) in the beginning of this film. Warner Bros. Pictures, this film’s distributor, would go on to release an adaptation of the novel 3 years later.

• The sound of Ellie biting out Gabriel’s (Jayden Daniels) eyeball in the hallway was accomplished by recording Bruce Campbell furiously biting into an apple.
• Bruce Campbell can be heard in one of the recordings that Danny plays saying, “Destroy it! It’s called the Book of The Dead for a reason!” it’s theorized that this is indeed Ash Williams saying it, since Ash time traveled more than once before.

• At the end of the film, Beth wields a chainsaw and says to the demons, “Come get some.” This is an homage to Ash Williams, who says the same thing while holding a shotgun in the S-Mart at the end of Army Of Darkness.
• Lee Cronin confirmed that Mr. Fonda’s cat, last seen and heard in the building’s vents, did in fact survive the events of the film.

• The elevator scene where the blood starts to fill behind the lit buttons was a nod to the projector in the original film that filled with blood.
• When Ellie bit out Gabriel’s eye and shot it into Jake’s (Billy Reynolds-McCarthy) mouth, that was an homage to Evil Dead II, where Henrietta’s eye flew into Bobby Joe’s mouth.

• The three deadites in the family all had different eye colors. Ellie’s glowing silver eyes were unique to her deadite. Bridget’s (Gabrielle Echols) golden yellow eyes were a reference to the 2013 Evil Dead deadites. Danny’s pupil-less white were of course a reference to the deadites in 1981’s The Evil Dead.
• When Lee Cronin discussed how being stuck indoors during the Covid pandemic influenced the story, he stated, “I think it was on my mind, the fact that I was writing a film about a family facing an evil force outside their door that they don’t understand, and just like at that time was the first wave of Covid. You remember talking to friends like, ‘I’ve read this or I’ve heard that’ or anything was kind of possible at that point in time. So I do think that there was some sort of commonality between what me and the rest of the world was going through, and what I was writing and what was happening in the script. I definitely found that I had time to look around my space more, and things like the cheese grater in the movie came from actually, I wasn’t writing in my office or I wasn’t writing in a library, I was around all these domestic items. So it kind of worked out. It was the right place to work on this story.”