Director Sébastien Vaniček Offers Details on ‘Evil Dead Burn’ Scene that Was Trimmed to Avoid NC-17
The closer we get to it, the more excited I am for horror fans to experience Sébastien Vaniček‘s Evil Dead Burn. For a franchise that has never known the word “restraint”, the filmmaker turned it all the way up to eleven with the gore and violence, and let me tell you, it fucking rips. So much so that we recently reported the film received some trimming to avoid an NC-17 rating.
Back in June, Vaniček told SFX Magazine, “There is a scene that is not R-rated. It’s a really, really hard scene. And I have to cut it, unfortunately, so you just won’t experience it as brutally as it is right now because I need to have the R-rated movie. So we are trying to find a good balance.”
Of course, we had to know what scene he was talking about. During my interview with the filmmaker, he offered a few more details on the moment in question. “We had to trim little bits. The original cut had an NC-17. And they aimed for a particular scene where I was like, okay, that’s the moment where it’s going a little bit too far,” said Vaniček. “And that’s the goal of Evil Dead, to go as far as you can. So at some point, you just have to leverage a little bit and trim a little bit. We didn’t remove anything. We just played a little bit with things.”
Added Vaniček, “There’s one scene that is very, very, very brutal…where something happens to a head, that’s long, and cold, and raw, and it was longer in my cut. I made it a little bit shorter. And maybe with fewer close-ups.”
SPOILERS AHEAD. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.
While the filmmaker didn’t come out and tell me exactly what scene he was referring to, in my mind, there’s only one it could be. And I can tell you, the scene in question is the sort of gruesome that had me giddy the whole way through the film.
Within the first fifteen minutes or so, Alice’s (Souheila Yacoub) shit heel of a husband (George Pullar) is on the way home from a night of drinking. The sudden appearance of Jessica from Evil Dead Rise (now a Deadite) causes an accident, sending the vehicle off the road.
The bastard then awakens to see Jessica trapped in the window of his car, face inches away, and neck deeply severed. Through some effort, she stretches her neck until her head rips off in a bloody splash. Her head then rolls to a spot nearby, where she grins at the guy before watching him go up in flames.
It’s grisly. It’s shocking. And it’s oh so Evil Dead.
Thankfully, it sounds like Vaniček only had to do some trimming here or there rather than cut out whole scenes. But hopefully, we can expect a director’s cut at some point with the scenes as they were originally intended. We sickos demand it.
In the film, after the loss of her husband, a woman seeks solace with her in-laws in their secluded family home. As one by one they are transformed into Deadites—turning the gathering into a family reunion from hell—she comes to discover that the vows she took in life live on… even in death.
Dune: Part Two actress Souheila Yacoub stars as Alice in Evil Dead Burn alongside Hunter Doohan (Wednesday), Luciane Buchanan (The Night Agent), and Tandi Wright (Pearl), with Erroll Shand, Edgar Price, Maude Davey, Keanu Karim, and Victory Ndukwe.
See for yourself just how vicious Evil Dead Burn is when the film screams into theaters July 10 via Warner Bros.
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