Evil Dead Rise Director Teases Multiple Dead Rise Books

Lee Cronin, director of the upcoming Evil Dead Rise, explains how the new film's Necronomicon Ex-Mortis relates to the rest of the franchise.

The director of Evil Dead Rise has teased how the film's new Necronomicon Ex-Mortis will tie in with the rest of the series. The film is the fifth theatrical entry in the Evil Dead franchise, which began in 1981 and spawned a trilogy starring Bruce Campbell as chainsaw-wielding hero Ashley J. Williams, Legion of Darkness, which lasted until 1993. The film was followed by a 2013 remake starring Jane Levy, before Campbell returned to Starz for a three-season series called Ashes vs. The Evil. Evil Dead Rise, which hits theaters April 21, is largely unrelated to any established characters, as a family is torn apart by demonic possession in an apartment building in Los Angeles.

Empire recently had the opportunity to sit down with director Lee Cronin to discuss the recent Evil Dead Rise trailer. During the conversation, they discussed the fact that the series' core Necronomicon, the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, has a new design. He revealed that while each film in the series has its own book design, he specifically told original trilogy director Sam Raimi that he wanted his film to use the only unused copy of the Necronomicon The trio seen in Army of Darkness say the three books "all have slightly different personalities". Read his full quote below: ^Given the complex and often confusing chronology of the Evil Dead series, many fans have wondered in which version of the universe Evil Dead Rises takes place. While Campbell did briefly appear in intermittent post-credits scenes in the 2013 remake, the film primarily presents a different version of the Demonic Entity universe than the original trilogy. While the new film seems to have inherited the remake in terms of intense violence, Necronomicon appears to be closer to the original film in terms of its look and kick-off.

In one of the early meetings I had with Sam Raimi, I said, "You know the way in Army Of Darkness, there's three [Necronomicons]? You had one, [Evil Dead 2013 director] Fede [Alvarez] had one, I'm going to take the other one." It gave me that platform to nudge things forward, and also to showcase that we live in a world where there is more than one copy of the Necronomicon. Those books may all have slightly different personalities – it's not exactly the same book, necessarily, that Ash had in the cabin. But it's very, very firmly related. It could even be more dangerous…

The Evil Dead Movies Have Always Had a Loose Continuity

However, parsing between the remake and the original trilogy itself is not a clean and easy task. The 1981 original The Evil Dead didn't actually feature the Necronomicon at all, instead featuring a book called Naturom Demonto, which also appeared in the 2013 remake. In fact, it's been argued that each film in the original trilogy was essentially a reboot of the previous one, using elements of the previous story as inspiration for an entirely new one Ash's backstory.

Many other iconic elements of the Evil Dead series have been similarly restructured or restructured over the years. For example, the fact that Ash works at a department store called S-Mart wasn't introduced until Dark Legion, though that fact carried over into Ash vs. Evil Dead. Given the inherent looseness of the franchise universe, Evil Dead Rise has more flexibility when it comes to canon, though fans will be happy to learn that Cronin intends to draw directly on the Dark Legion mythology, even if the story goes in a slightly different direction. ^More More: How Evil Dead 2 Secretly Started Remake in the 80s^ Source: Empire