This Week in Horror: A Blair Witch Refusal, Curry Barkers Chainsaw, and Evil Deads Trip to 1972

The week opened with one of the original Blair Witch actors going on record to say she wants nothing to do with the reboot, and it closed with me sitting in the dark at 2 a.m. crying over a Wicker Man bonus disc. In between, a YouTube guy who made a movie for eight hundred dollars got handed Leatherface, and a producer reminded everyone that the next Evil Dead takes place before color TV had fully settled in. Nobody is having a quiet June. Let us get into it.

Rei Hance Read the Blair Witch Contract and Walked

For weeks the loudest thing about the new Blair Witch was a name that kept not appearing. Two thirds of the original trio signed on. The third stayed quiet. This week Rei Hance, the actress once credited as Heather Donahue, ended the silence herself in a Facebook comment reported by Deadline. She is not participating. She was offered a deal, she read it, and she said no.

It came after producer James Wan started talking up the reboot as a reunion of “all the original people,” which quietly folded Hance into a group she never agreed to join. She named four reasons she would not sign: rights, the future technological use of her identity and voice, her ability to speak freely, and compensation. Nobody has released the contract, and she did not say the words “artificial intelligence.” When a performer in 2026 lists “future use of identity and voice” as a dealbreaker, you are allowed to do the math, but the math is yours, not hers.

What makes it land harder is the history. The original grossed roughly $248 million on a $60,000 budget, and the marketing sold audiences on the idea that these three real people had actually vanished in the woods. Hance got an obituary while she was alive to read it. Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams came aboard the Dylan Clark film for Lionsgate and Blumhouse’s Atomic Monster as executive producers. Hance kept the one thing nobody has managed to take yet. Getting lost in the woods was always the easy part. The contract is the part that haunts.

Curry Barker Now Has a Fake Haunted House and a Real Farmhouse

Curry Barker spent years making things for almost no money, and now two studios are handing him keys. In a new interview with The Playlist this week, he talked through both jobs sitting on his desk, and they could not look less alike from across the room.

The first is Anything But Ghosts, now in post for Focus Features, about two con men who fake hauntings for grieving clients until they walk into a house with something real in it. Barker and his longtime partner Cooper Tomlinson play the grifters. The cast that gathered around them is the part that made the industry sit up: Aaron Paul, Bryce Dallas Howard, Violet McGraw, and Chris Reinacher, who joined in June. It shares a universe with Obsession, Barker’s debut, which has since passed The Blair Witch Project as the highest-grossing festival acquisition ever recorded. Two Blair Witch references in one roundup. The woods are everywhere this week.

The second job is heavier. A24 has handed him a Texas Chainsaw Massacre feature to write and direct, and he is early enough that there is no script yet, no cast, no date. What he has is an angle. He wants the family, not just the man with the saw, telling Total Film there is “some really messed up stuff happening at that farm.” One thing to keep straight, because the coverage keeps blurring it: his movie is its own thing, separate from the A24 Texas Chainsaw TV series that JT Mollner is directing. Two projects, two teams, one chainsaw. Comedy and horror are the same engine pointed in opposite directions, and Barker has spent his whole career proving he knows which way it is facing. Now he gets to find out if that instinct survives a farmhouse.

Evil Dead Is Going Back to 1972, and Bruce Campbell Is Fine Staying Home

The Evil Dead news kept compounding this week, so let me sort the pile. Producer Robert Tapert has confirmed, in comments reported by Dread Central, that Evil Dead Wrath is set in 1972 and built around a coming-of-age story, which puts it nine years before Sam Raimi first cracked open the Book of the Dead in 1981. Director Francis Galluppi, who made the lean desert thriller The Last Stop in Yuma County, is shooting it to look like it crawled out of the decade on warm, tungsten film stock. 1972 also quietly robs the characters of every modern way to call for help. No phones, no GPS, no signal. Just teenagers being wrong about everything in real time.

Tapert warned the film may be the franchise’s toughest fight yet with the ratings board, which tracks for a story this interested in tearing innocence apart. Meanwhile Bruce Campbell told Deadline this month that the series has officially “moved away” from Ash, and he sounds relieved about it. He is not coming back, and he is right not to. The franchise has proven twice over it can live without him. The more immediate business is Evil Dead Burn, Sébastien Vaniček’s present-day entry about a family gathering gone wrong, which hits theaters July 10. Two very different Evil Dead films are in motion, and the only thing they share is the willingness to leave the cabin behind.

I Cried Over a Wicker Man Blu-ray and I Stand By It

I watched Children of the Wicker Man alone at 2 a.m. this week and called Robin Hardy’s two sons the next morning to tell them so before I asked a single question. Severin Films is giving the documentary a worldwide disc premiere, and I would forgive you for filing that under “more bonus material for a movie I already love.” Do not. This is not a victory lap for the cornerstone of folk horror. It is two grown men picking through what their father left in the house after the world took the part it wanted.

Dominic Hardy, an art historian, and Justin Hardy, a filmmaker, set out to make a documentary about why a half-century-old British movie still owns a corner of so many brains. Then a 28-year-old editor finishing her PhD looked at their footage, said she was more interested in the silences than the talking, and cut a different, sadder film out of the material.

The disc runs 96 minutes and comes with a 232-page hardcover book built from Robin Hardy’s long-unseen personal papers. Justin was blunt about why the book matters more than another remaster: “You can bring out as many 4Ks as you’d like till you’re blue in the face,” he told me, “but you and I know that doesn’t ultimately alter the film.” Horror history is very good at preserving the art. It is much worse at preserving the people who were standing next to the artist when the fire caught.

Quick Hits

Lucio Fulci would have turned 99. The Godfather of Gore was born June 17, 1927, and the iHorror tribute this week makes the case I have always made for him at parties nobody invited me to: the gut-munching was never the point. The dread underneath it was. The eye splinter still wins.

Villa Diodati hit 210. Two centuries and a decade ago, a rained-out summer on Lake Geneva trapped Byron, the Shelleys, and John Polidori indoors with a ghost-story dare, and out of that boredom came both Frankenstein and the modern literary vampire. Worst group vacation, best creative output in the history of bad weather.

Lucile Hadžihalilović is getting the box set she deserves. Severin and new label Yellow Veil Pictures are releasing The Worlds of Lucile Hadžihalilović on June 30, a four-disc set collecting Innocence, Evolution, Earwig, and The Ice Tower, two of them North American Blu-ray premieres. If you have never let one of her films wash over you with no plot to hold onto, start at the end of the month.

See You Next Week

That is the week: a refusal, a chainsaw, a trip to 1972, and a documentary that wrecked me on a Tuesday night. Horror does not slow down for summer, so neither will we. Keep it tuned to iHorror for everything between now and next Friday, and come back then, when something new will inevitably be on fire.