Is Evil Dead Rise (2023) woke?

BALANCED TRADITIONAL -- Evil Dead Rise scores +10 TRAD on the VirtueVigil VVWS scale. Here's the question VirtueVigil readers want answered: is Evil Dead Rise just another female-led horror film where th...

What is the VirtueVigil score for Evil Dead Rise?

VirtueVigil scores Evil Dead Rise as BALANCED TRADITIONAL with a margin of +10 TRAD. Traditional score: 15.96, Woke score: 5.48.

What woke content appears in Evil Dead Rise?

Woke content identified in Evil Dead Rise: All-female protagonist ensemble with male characters incapacitated early; Single mother family unit, absent father normalized; Career woman with unwanted pregnancy.

Would conservatives enjoy Evil Dead Rise?

Likely -- Evil Dead Rise has more traditional than progressive content. Conservative viewers should find it worth watching.

BALANCED TRADITIONAL

Evil Dead Rise

Name: Evil Dead Rise
Item: Evil Dead Rise
Rating: 71
Author: VirtueVigil Editorial Team

Here's the question VirtueVigil readers want answered: is Evil Dead Rise just another female-led horror film where the message is that men are useless and women are the only ones capable of defending what matters? Short answer: no. Longer answer follows.

Full analysis below

Film · Theatrical May 12, 2026 Analyzed by Debra Ducane 11 min read

Woke Score

5.48

Traditional Score

15.96

Authenticity Index

71%

Score Margin

+10 TRAD

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✅ NOT A WOKE TRAP

Evil Dead Rise does not qualify as a woke trap. The margin is positive (+10 TRAD), disqualifying it automatically under VVWS v1.1 criteria. The film's female-led cast is visible in marketing. The traditional elements, protecting children from evil, family loyalty against a supernatural threat, and the absolute moral clarity of the Deadite as an unambiguous enemy, are not concealed. The film is what it looks like from the trailer. Conservative horror fans who went in expecting a good horror film received one.

Creative Team

DirectorLee Cronin

Lead ProducerRob Tapert (Renaissance Pictures / Pacific Renaissance)

ComposerStephen McKeon

Top Cast

Lily Sullivan as BethAlyssa Sutherland as EllieMorgan Davies as DannyGabrielle Echols as BridgetNell Fisher as Kassie

Our Verdict on Evil Dead Rise

The film opens with Beth (Lily Sullivan), a guitar technician working the road, discovering she's pregnant. She travels to Los Angeles to visit her estranged sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), who lives with her three children in a deteriorating apartment building. Ellie's husband has left the family. Beth and Ellie haven't been close for years. Something fractured between them. The film doesn't explain it, which is fine; families fracture in ways that don't require explanation.

That reunion lasts about fifteen minutes before everything goes wrong.

Ellie's teenage son Danny finds the Book of the Dead in a collapsed parking structure beneath the building. He plays the recording. Ellie gets possessed. What follows is 70 minutes of sustained, bloody, inventive horror as Beth tries to protect Danny, Bridget, and young Kassie from the thing their mother has become.

The premise is built on one of the oldest and most viscerally effective horror constructs: the person who should protect you has become the thing you need protection from. A possessed mother is a different horror than a possessed stranger. Alyssa Sutherland understands this and plays Ellie's possession as a corruption of maternal identity, not just a body-swap. The thing wearing Ellie uses what Ellie knows about her children against them. It knows what each one fears. It knows how to make each one hesitate. This is specific horror, not generic horror, and it works because Sutherland commits to the specificity.

Lily Sullivan as Beth is the film's moral center. She's not a character with a destiny or a special connection to the Necronomicon. She's just a woman who decides that she will not let these children die. That's it. No chosen one mythology. No secret power. Just a decision to keep fighting until there's nothing left to fight with. That is a traditional heroic framework: the will to protect is what constitutes the hero, not any intrinsic quality.

The film has three woke markers worth noting for VirtueVigil readers. One: the cast is almost entirely female, and the male characters are neutralized quickly. Danny (the son) causes the whole catastrophe and is removed from agency early. Two: Ellie is a single mother because her husband abandoned the family. The film treats this as unremarkable backstory. Three: Beth is pregnant and uncertain about it. The pregnancy is mentioned early and then largely ignored once the horror begins.

None of these elements dominates the film's values architecture. The pregnancy subplot never resolves as a political statement. The absent father is used to establish Ellie's precarious situation, not to make an argument about fatherhood. The female-led cast exists in service of a story about protecting children from evil, which is as traditional as a horror film can be.

Lee Cronin is a skilled filmmaker. The apartment building is used with a claustrophobic intelligence that makes familiar horror geography feel new. The third act, in which the building itself has been transformed by demonic occupation, is photographed with a grim ambition. Several set pieces, particularly one involving a cheese grater, will become franchise references.

Evil Dead Rise grossed $147 million worldwide on a $19 million budget. It's the highest-grossing film in the Evil Dead series. The franchise continues with Evil Dead: Burn, releasing July 2026. Verdict: TRADITIONAL. Cronin delivered a film about what horror has always been, at its best, about: protecting what you love when something wants to destroy it.

Woke Tropes & Content Analysis

Trope Audit – VVWS Weighted Scoring

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
All-female protagonist ensemble with male characters incapacitated early	3	High	High	3.78
Single mother family unit, absent father normalized	2	High	Low	0.7
Career woman with unwanted pregnancy	2	Moderate	Low	1
TOTAL WOKE				5.5

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Family protector stepping up when family is under attack	4	High	High	5.04
Evil as unambiguous supernatural force with no redemptive dimension	3	High	High	3.78
Protecting children as the supreme moral imperative	4	High	High	5.04
Sibling loyalty across estrangement	3	High	Moderate	2.1
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				16.0

Score Margin: +10 TRAD

Creative Team Deep Dive

Director: Lee Cronin

MIXED. Cronin is an Irish filmmaker who made his feature debut with The Hole in the Ground (2019). His politics aren't prominently on display. Evil Dead Rise has a female-led cast and a single-mother household at its center, but neither element functions as agenda-driven messaging. Cronin's apparent interest is in craft: how do you put a family under maximum pressure in a confined space and squeeze 96 minutes of genuine horror out of it? He succeeds at that. His framework for family, for what it means that children need to be protected and that adults step up to protect them, is traditional even if his casting choices reflect contemporary Hollywood norms.

Cronin was hired by producer Rob Tapert and executive producers Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell after the success of The Hole in the Ground established him as someone who could work in the supernatural horror genre with control and craft. The decision to relocate the Evil Dead mythology from the cabin in the woods to a Los Angeles apartment building was his, and it was the right call. It makes the Deadite threat feel inescapable in a new way. Cronin directs gore with precision and creativity. The film has five or six set pieces that are among the most technically accomplished in recent horror.

Content Breakdown

Adult Viewer Insight

The Evil Dead franchise has a theological dimension that rarely gets discussed in mainstream film criticism but that Sam Raimi clearly understood. The Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, the Book of the Dead, functions in these films as an anti-Scripture: a text that inverts the order of creation, summoning death instead of life, corrupting instead of sanctifying. The Deadites are demonic in the specific theological sense. They are not simply dangerous. They are the inversion of what it means to be human. Evil Dead Rise takes this framework seriously by putting the possession inside a family. The family is the smallest unit of human community, the basic building block of civilization. When it is corrupted, there is no safe place, no retreat, no appeal to a larger institution. There is only the will to protect what remains. This is horror at its deepest: the violation of what should be sacred.

Parental Guidance

Rated R for bloody horror violence and gore throughout, and language. This is one of the harder R-rated horror films VirtueVigil has reviewed. The gore is sustained, creative, and not suitable for younger viewers. The film's values are traditional, but the delivery is brutal. Not for children or younger teenagers. Horror-literate adults 17 and up.