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Film news: ‘Evil Dead Wrath’ is taking the Necronomicon all the way back to 1972

Three-panel collage featuring text and imagery from the horror franchise. On the left, a large red panel displays the stylized, cream-coloured text "EVIL DEAD WRATH". The top-right panel shows Bruce Campbell in The Evil Dead (1981), wearing a blue shirt and holding an axe over his shoulder and a shotgun in his hand under a pink moon. The bottom-right panel displays Bridget Hoffman in an iconic scene from the same film, reaching upward as she is dragged into the ground by a demonic hand gripping her neck.

Producer Robert Tapert has begun pulling back the curtain on the next chapter of the cabin-in-the-woods saga, and Evil Dead Wrath is a period piece nobody saw coming. 

Film News Blitz’s RC Stacey reaches for the Book of the Dead.

Here’s everything we know about the franchise’s boldest departure yet.

While Evil Dead Burn remains on deck to spill blood this summer (in cinemas on 10 July), producer Tapert has already started teasing where the long-running franchise heads next, and Evil Dead Wrath, from director Francis Galluppi, sounds like a complete departure from anything the series has attempted before.

Is ‘Evil Dead Wrath’ going to be a prequel?

Speaking at Michigan State University back in April, Tapert revealed that Wrath is a period piece set before the events of the original The Evil Dead

In his own words, the film “predates everything. It takes place in 1972,” effectively making Galluppi’s entry an Evil Dead prequel, unless, of course, the mythology gets twisted somewhere along the way.

That alone is a seismic shift. 

Sam Raimi’s 1981 original first unleashed the Deadites on Ash and his ill-fated friends, so reaching back to 1972 plants Wrath in an earlier, unexplored corner of the lore, long before the franchise’s most infamous night in the woods.

Tapert teased that Galluppi and his cinematographer are chasing the warm, tungsten-soaked texture of Ektachrome 100, a film stock once favoured for features of the era. 

It’s a meticulous, throwback approach that should surprise nobody who caught Galluppi’s The Last Stop in Yuma County, a film praised for its controlled compositions and pressure-cooker tension. 

Tapert drew a sharp contrast between Galluppi’s deliberate, almost Tarantino-esque eye and the restless, handheld energy of Sébastien Vaníček’s Burn.

Perhaps most intriguingly, Tapert suggested that Wrath leans into coming-of-age sexual hijinks, territory the franchise has rarely, if ever, explored. 

Where Burn sounds like domestic trauma and demonic brutality, Wrath is shaping up to be something stranger and altogether more dangerous: 1972 period grain, teenage chaos, and a tone the series hasn’t dared to try.

Evil Dead Wrath is currently slated for a theatrical release on 7 April 2028.

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