Evil Dead Wrath Is a Coming-of-Age Nightmare Set in 1972

The next batch of Evil Dead characters will have to survive puberty and demonic possession on the same weekend, because apparently growing up was not punishing enough on its own. Producer Robert Tapert has revealed that Evil Dead Wrath, the next film in the franchise from director Francis Galluppi, takes place in 1972 and is built around a coming-of-age story.

Speaking at Michigan State University this past April, Tapert laid out how far Galluppi is pulling the series away from the cabin formula. “It predates everything. It takes place in 1972,” he said, which puts the movie nine years before Sam Raimi first unleashed the Book of the Dead in 1981’s The Evil Dead. One thing to settle before anyone draws up a timeline chart: Tapert did not call it a prequel, and New Line has not used the word officially. The film is set before the original. That is the confirmed part. Whether it touches Ash, the Knowby recordings, or any familiar corner of the mythology is unconfirmed, and Bruce Campbell recently said the franchise has deliberately moved away from Ash and is “not part of any big overriding story or scheme.”

Why 1972 Earns Its Place

Tapert also said the film is being shot to look like it crawled out of the decade, with Galluppi and his cinematographer chasing the warm, tungsten quality of Ektachrome 100 film stock. Nice texture detail. The more interesting part is what 1972 quietly steals from the characters.

No cell phones. No internet. No GPS politely routing you around the bad road. When something goes wrong in 1972, you are stuck with whatever adult happens to be nearest, and this franchise has never once produced an adult who knew what he was doing. Isolation is the entire engine here, and dropping the story before the conveniences we now use to call for help is a meaner choice than it first sounds. It also lands before the slasher rulebook hardened into convention, so these kids do not get to run on horror logic and survive on genre instinct. They get to be wrong about everything, in real time, with no signal.

Coming of Age, With Deadites

This is where the premise stops reading like a gimmick and starts looking like the most sensible thing the series has tried in a long while. Adolescence is already a horror setup. Your body changes without asking. The people you love turn into strangers, then into people you cannot stand, then briefly back into strangers. You make catastrophic decisions on pure confidence. You figure out that the adults are improvising too.

A Deadite is that exact fear handed a set of claws. The franchise has always been about someone you trust turning, mid-sentence, into a thing that wears their face and wants you dead. Put that in a story about teenagers and the metaphor does most of the work for free. The friend who knew all your secrets last week is now hostile, unrecognizable, and saying cruel things in a voice that is almost theirs. Every kid has felt a milder version of that across a lunch table. Galluppi just gets to take it all the way to possession.

Tapert teased that the movie has “a lot of coming-of-age sexual hijinks in it,” something he admitted the universe is “not really known” for. Evil Dead has always punished curiosity, impulse, and bad ideas chased at full sprint, which also happens to be the complete personality profile of being seventeen. He has warned the film may be the franchise’s toughest fight yet with the ratings board, which checks out for a story this interested in tearing innocence apart.

The Galluppi Factor

Galluppi got this job off the back of The Last Stop in Yuma County, his debut, a tight desert thriller built from confined spaces, mounting pressure, and people making steadily worse choices without leaving one location. Tapert called him “very deliberate” and “very Tarantino-esque,” setting him against Evil Dead Burn director Sébastien Vaniček and his handheld, always-shaking approach. Galluppi has not made supernatural horror before. He has made genuine dread out of a diner and a gas pump, which might be the better résumé line for this.

One of Two

Keep your Evil Dead films straight, because two are coming and they could not be less alike. Evil Dead Burn, due in theaters this summer, is Vaniček’s present-day entry about a widow whose in-laws turn during a family gathering. Wrath is the other animal: 1972, vintage film stock, teenagers, and a nastier streak. Galluppi wrote and directed it, with Raimi and Tapert producing, a cast led by Charlotte Hope, Jessica McNamee, and Zach Gilford, and New Line putting it in theaters April 7, 2028. The shoot has already wrapped.

Most coming-of-age stories end with a kid finally understanding who they are. This one might ask them to first work out whether the person wearing their best friend’s face is still their best friend. Grow up, die, get back up.