The Evil Dead franchise has proven, albeit sporadically, that it’s capable of producing shocking entertainment for gore-horror enthusiasts. Though the 2013 stand-alone film simply titled Evil Dead (is it a sequel? A remake? A reboot? Who knows and who cares, but there were three Necronomicons, which helps) doesn’t move beyond a fairly weak script and equally plastic acting, director Fede Álvarez injects enough modernized, grueling tension doused with subtle-enough comedic hints to elevate it beyond its lackluster—the same tension Lee Cronin echoes and enhances in Evil Dead’s decade-later successor, Evil Dead Rise, to much crispier results. With Evil Dead Burn just around the corner and Evil Dead Wrath expected in 2028, both newer Evil entries deserve a revisit to remind us that darkness bleeds wherever it can.

Evil Dead, in relatively classic requel fashion, reimagines the original The Evil Dead with slightly heftier personal stakes. Mia Allen (Jane Levy) ventures to her late mother’s abandoned, nature-taken, rotted-out cabin to kick her heroin addiction. Bringing good friends Olivia (Jessica Lucas) and Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) to help her out, the group finds that Mia’s estranged brother, David (Shiloh Fernandez), and his girlfriend, Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore), have also arrived to aid, along with the Allen family dog, Grandpa. Mia’s friends bark at David; he apologizes, and the group tries to reconcile their fractured relationships whilst helping Mia with what turns out to be her second sobriety attempt. Before she makes any progress, though, they find a litter of strung-up dead animals amidst other witchcraft instruments in the cabin’s basement, all leading to a mysterious book of demonic chant and promises. Deadites, death, and decay await.

Evil Dead Rise’s only similarity to its predecessor is that it involves estranged family members, sisters Beth (Lily Sullivan) and Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland). The former, a guitar technician by day, discovers she’s pregnant and contacts Ellie for assistance despite the strain. Upon meeting in Ellie’s L.A. apartment, Ellie informs Beth that her husband left her and their three kids—Danny (Morgan Davies), Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), and Kassie (Nell Fisher)—to fend for themselves. After agreeing to help each other, a massive earthquake erupts, revealing a secret, moldy chamber that holds a mysterious book and a few recordings, which Danny investigates. Hoping to sell these artifacts to help Ellie pay bills, Danny reads the Necronomicon—here referred to literally as one of three volumes of the Naturom Demonto—and accidentally unleashes a demon of violent deeds through a recording in which a priest recites some of the book’s demonic prayers, after revealing his failed attempts to research the book’s power (the priest is briefly interrupted by a naysayer voiced by Bruce Campbell– a time-displaced Ash Williams from the original trilogy, perhaps?). The demon latches onto Ellie. Hell ensues, engulfing this family and the cracked L.A. streets surrounding them in possessed chaos. Grit, willpower, and a few chainsaws are the only tools these decades-spanning bands of Deadite fighters have at their disposal. Pray it’s enough.

Neither of these later Evil Dead films fails by any means, even if the earlier one’s a bit thinner. Evil Dead is a solid remake/sequel to the old Bruce Campbell-led series, snapping it back to the horrifying roots that made The Evil Dead and (partially) Evil Dead II so successful. Though characters speak generically in every instance—”David, I read a passage from that book, and it was some sort of prayer. I released something David. I released something evil,” Eric at some point pleads in a hokey fashion, desperately in need of some piano slams and thunder to drive this dumbfounded point home—the general premise of family and friends sticking by one another in the face of an overwhelming force shines. Combined with a fierce score by Roque Baños, and all the camera shaking, red-brown-pinks of death, puke and guts, and smart plotting that Fede Álvarez has become known for, Evil Dead surpasses its stock characters in its focus on darkness’s carelessness in its raping of souls and bodies alike. The integrity of this increasingly corrupted world comes through atmospherically and narratively enough for other pale qualities to fade.

Mia, herself, is also a compelling and unexpected main character. Thanks in part to Jane Levy’s puckish performance, which sets her apart from the rest of the cast’s near-mediocrity, Mia starts as a damsel in distress and annoyance who gets jettisoned into something else entirely. Though committed to her sobriety when first declaring, “Okay. May my friends and family witness this act, an irrevocable promise to my commitment that… Fuck it,” and throwing her heroin stash down a well, no one believes her. David’s much more hopeful, as he’s been absent, but his present and very angry friend Olivia admits that a year prior, they failed at the same thing in a summer cabin elsewhere. Collectively deciding to force Mia to stick with it, as she doesn’t have a license, they ignore her pleas for escape. If only they knew Eric’s mindless curiosity would unleash hell in the forest that literally assaults Mia and inlays its will on her being, forcing the others to stop a demon head-on before it gets what it wants. Mia will soon understand there’s a lot more to worry about than a silly drug addiction—a lesson which, according to her friends, even her first overdose where “she legally died” didn’t teach her. Maybe a good old-fashioned house fire and some chainsaw mutilation will rid her and the world of her demons.

Evil Dead Rise significantly upgrades what this first remake-sequel-reboot attempt presented, enhancing the naturalness of its characters to double down on the terror of darkness. Both Beth and Ellie are trying to redeem themselves in some way. Beth, with a new life to care for and having turned to someone she had already emotionally wounded, is looking to turn the page. Insecure about being a “groupie” guitar technician—a rockstar dream she essentially abandoned her family to chase—she uses her new child as a goalpost to become a more responsible and loving human being. Ellie, of course, is hesitant, given Beth’s spottiness: “I called you. Twice. First time, when he [my ex-husband] told me he was leaving. Second, the night he moved out. That was two and a half months ago, Beth.” It’s hard to re-accept others’ disloyalty when one’s got three kids of their own to raise, suddenly alone. Even without the initially unseen force, this family’s got a lot to face, whether or not they stand together. It’s all the more understandable that Danny, the oldest and most responsible of Ellie’s three level-headed kids, would think to sell something he finds valuable after an earthquake.

Such familial strains and bonds are precisely the heartstrings that Rise’s demon plucks. Taking Ellie in a similarly vine-wrapping fashion as Evil Dead’s did to Mia (though without the same sexual violence), this new demon swarms Beth and the rest of the family not just with an army of neighbor-turned-Deadites, but well-timed mockery reminiscent of Evil Dead II’s comedic components. With the kids, demon Ellie continuously tries to trick them with maternal concern or affection: “Oh. Nothing a big old hug and kiss from you won’t fix. Open up now, like a good girl,” she says to Kassie, her youngest, in trying to get back into the family’s apartment. Often, as she does here, she succeeds, ripping cabinet doors, spilling viscera of all kinds, and knocking in walls or ceilings in her wrath. With Beth, she more straightforwardly mocks her insecurities, eliciting nothing but discomforting cackles as Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II once did: “Open the door like you open your legs, you stinking groupie slut!” Yet what this new Deadite leader undermines is the strength of this “groupie slut’s” newfound loyalty to her nieces and nephews. Trauma quickly bonds, and humans can adapt even faster; as Kassie tells Beth, “You’d be a good mom someday, Auntie Beth…. You know how to lie to kids” in times of alarm that require comfort, her drive to protect her current and soon-to-be kin could just be enough to stop Deadites yet again in their tracks.

All Evil Dead films come with an expected amount of cheese—floppy one-liners, monsters taking turns hurting their victims, and predictability infect Rise as well—but Evil Dead remains a solidly scary return to the larger franchise that Evil Dead Rise greatly improves on. Guts galore, of course, but genuinely compelling characters, mixed with themes that expand from film to film, make Evil Dead and Evil Dead Rise fun, increasingly effective rides through evil versus family and friends. For horror comedy fans, original Evil Dead trilogy diehards, and those looking for a well-balanced, scary narrative, this Evil duo is sure to jolt.

Double feature screens Friday, 5/22, 11:00 p.m. @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
Part of the month-long midnight repertory series: Sam Raimi: Undead and Unseen!