Warning! This article contains spoilers for Evil Dead Rise. If you've yet to see the movie and you don't want to know anything that happens, turn back now.
It shouldn't be a surprise to anybody that Evil Dead Rise is a blood-drenched gorefest and, as is common with the long-running franchise, barely any of the characters make it out alive. When writing the script, director Lee Cronin let his imagination run wild, but there were a couple of lines he figured he shouldn't cross – and one of them was killing the cat.
In a new interview with Total Film and 12DOVE, the filmmaker revealed that earlier versions of the flick weren't so forgiving to the feline, whose off-screen, air duct-scampering antics are mentioned early on in the final cut. In fact, one saw it being devoured by possessed baddie Ellie, and another had it turn into a deadite.
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"It was written. Oh, it was written where you actually see [Ellie] crawling through the [vent] and she's finishing off the cat, just swallowing the tail," Cronin tells us. "Then there was... but our budget never allowed this... I wanted – you know the hatch that opens in the back of Danny's bedroom – I wanted Kassie and Beth to escape that way. You think things are getting to safety, and then they come across a deadite cat.
"Ultimately, though, the thing I've learned is that people fucking hate if you do anything to animals. It literally turns people off your movie. Someone asked a question in a Q&A the other night and they cheered when I said the cat survived. The entire audience cheered. I actually chose the take of the cat running away just to make clear that it got out."
Starring Lily Sullivan and Alyssa Sutherland, Evil Dead Rise centers on sisters Beth and Ellie, whose strained relationship gets pushed to breaking point when the latter's kids, Danny (Morgan Davies), Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), and Kassie (Nell Fisher) find a mysterious book in a bunker underneath their Los Angeles high-rise.
Unaware of the dark origins of their discoveries, the youngsters ferry them back up to their apartment – and inadvertently unleash an all-powerful demon that takes up residence in their mother's body. With that, Beth, who is grappling with the news that she's pregnant, is forced to try and keep her nieces and nephew safe over the course of a terrifying 12 hours.
As teased in the trailers, Bridget is the first of the children to turn after Ellie, before Danny also succumbs to the entity that's causing his family to violently torment (and murder) everyone around them. Knowing the Evil Dead series' tradition of typically having only one hero standing at the end, who would've presumably always been Beth, we asked Cronin whether or not he ever dared to consider offing nine-year-old Kassie as well.
"I guess so, because when I'm starting to develop something, I won't shut down any avenue. I won't go, 'I'm definitely not doing that.' I'm going to let the themes and the story lead my choices. I always try to lean into what it is that I'm writing," he explains.
"With this one, because of the metaphor and Beth having to take on the mantle, I was like, 'I guess one of the kids has to survive.' I'm trying to think back, if I dug into drafts, did I ever write Kassie's death anywhere? Weirdly, you can't go too far with an Evil Dead movie but I think that might have been a little bit distasteful," Cronin continues. "I think it would have lost people in a way. There's suffering within that family already.
"I knew from the start, I wanted Beth to walk out and family can't be one person. At the very least, a family has to be two people and there's a little bit of hope at the end of the movie because families in life get destroyed by bad things all the time; by death, by trauma, by circumstance, so many things, but family can survive. So I wanted that little bit of hope, with the survivors walking away."
Evil Dead Rise is in UK and US cinemas now. For more on the movie, check out our chat with its stars Alyssa Sutherland and Lily Sullivan, or our spoiler-free conversation with director Lee Cronin.
