“Evil Dead Burn” key art.
Warner Bros. Pictures/New Line Cinema
Evil Dead Burn producer Rob Tapert says that one of the most brutal scenes in the new hit horror thriller had to be trimmed several times before the film could get an R rating from the Motion Picture Association.
The MPA, of course, determines ratings for all feature films that play in theaters. Before the MPA — then known as the Motion Picture Association of America — changed the X rating to NC-17 in 1990. Being slapped with an X rating made it virtually impossible for studios to get their movies into theaters at all, much less a wide release, because of the rating’s association with the porn industry. However, X-rated films, at the time the rating was instituted, also applied to films with excessive violence.
Even with the new classification, very few NC-17 films — 2024’s Terrifier 3 being an outlier — get wide theatrical distribution. As such, filmmakers — including Evil Dead Burn’s producers Tapert and Sam Raimi — still diligently work with the MPA to make proper cuts to their films to get an R rating.
Evil Dead Burn — which opened in theaters this past weekend — is the sixth film in the Evil Dead franchise, since Tapert, Raimi and the original trilogy’s star, Bruce Campbell, rebooted the series in 2013 with director Fede Alvarez’s remake of their 1981 horror classic The Evil Dead. Director Lee Cronin continued the series with Evil Dead Rise in 2023, while Infested filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček assumed the helm of Evil Dead Burn.
Evil Dead Burn stars Souheila Yacoub as Alice, who, after the tragic death of her husband, Will Price (George Pullar), goes to mourn at his family’s dilapidated countryside home, where Will’s grandfather did research into the Necronomicon, aka the Book of the Dead, which has the power to infiltrate humans with demonic spirits and turn them into Deadites.
Prior to Will’s death, his brother, Joseph (Wednesday star Hunter Doohan), began poking around in his grandfather’s research, not realizing that he unleashed hell to eventually allow demons to try to possess his family members. Once the Deadites re-emerge, they seek to claim the Kandarian Dagger that accompanies the Necronomicon, which is the only weapon that can vanquish them.
Evil Dead Burn also stars Luciane Buchanan as Joseph’s girlfriend Thya, Erroll Shand and Tandi Wright as Will and Joseph’s parents, Edgar and Susan, and Maude Davey as the sons’ grandmother, Polly.
Note: Major spoilers are discussed in the next section of this article.
Rob Tapert Says 1 Particular Scene In ‘Evil Dead Burn’ Was Submitted To The MPA 8 To 10 Times
One of the first people to become possessed as a Deadite in Evil Dead Burn is Thya, who returns to the Price family home with a car’s headrest that impaled her face before she became a Deadite. Also for reference, Thya is also the Deadite in the film’s terrifying trailer that drinks hot candle wax at the home upon her return.
As Thya begins to viciously attack other members of the Price family, Joseph feels that the only way to neutralize her is to bash her head in repeatedly with a dishwasher door. As it turns out, the MPA took issue with the extreme gore in the scene, and a series of cuts had to be made.
In a Zoom conversation with Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi before the release of Evil Dead Burn in theaters on July 10, Tapert detailed the process of dealing with the ratings board.
“Not to be their enemy, but we had to submit a particular sequence probably eight or 10 times,” Tapert said, speaking of the Joseph-Thya head-bashing scene. “It was a battle of attrition.”
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 30: Sébastien Vaniček, Luciane Buchanan, and Hunter Doohan attend “Evil Dead Burn” Fan Event at The Saban Theatre on June 30, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by David Jon/Getty Images for Warner Bros. Pictures )
Getty Images for Warner Bros. Pictures
Even with the cuts, I remarked to Tapert and Raimi that I couldn’t believe the film got away with as much brutality as it did, to which Raimi simply responded, “Me, neither.”
Tapert explained that it was never Sébastien Vaniček’s intention to be gratuitous with the violent scene and that there was a specific reason from a narrative standpoint that was behind his thinking.
“Sébastien wanted to — and I understand why he wanted to do it this way — because they had played Hunter’s character Joseph as a coward,” Tapert explained. “So, he wanted to stay on the scene for the most ridiculously long period of time to overcome that.”
Having dealt with the MPA before — the 1981 version of The Evil Dead received an X rating for its violence but is now classified as an NC-17 film on it streaming home on HBO Max — Tapert told his director that they were facing an uphill battle to keep the head-bashing scene as he originally cut it.
“I always told him, ‘Look, the MPA is not going to let us get away with that, and it’s going to be a problem’ — and it was,” Tapert recalled. “So, we kept resubmitting it and resubmitting it and resubmitting it, and we eventually got there. There were other things here and there that needed to be trimmed up a little bit, but [the head-bashing scene] was the big one.”
Rated R, Evil Dead Burn is new in theaters nationwide.