"I wouldn't say I wouldn't like to do it again but it was a serious undertaking."
Lee Cronin, the Irish writer and director of the now-in-cinemas horror reboot Evil Dead Rise, has opened up about the difficulties of shooting the movie's crazy finale.
JOE's entertainment editor Rory Cashin sat down with Cronin to discuss the film, which certainly delivers all the shocking thrills fans of the Evil Dead franchise have come to expect. In fact, even some of the marketing materials for the horror have faced some pushback in Ireland on account of being considered too threatening.
Along with JOE's initial nearly 25-minute-long interview video with Cronin (which you can watch here), we have published a separate clip in which the director gets into spoilers and breaks down Evil Dead Rise's monstrous and extremely violent finale.
So, for those who have not watched the movie yet, now is the time to close this window.
Still here? Okay, let us get into the ending.
So, after the family of protagonist Beth (Lily Sullivan) inadvertently unleashes the deadites - murderous demons that seek to possess human bodies, cause carnage and generally spread evil - the heroes attempt to escape their apartment building. However, to prevent them from doing so, all of the people in the building infected by the deadites merge together - forming one giant horrifying creation.
Cronin told JOE that the sequence was "without doubt the hardest part of the movie" to shoot, particularly given that the horror was impacted by a Covid lockdown right before it was about to be filmed.
"We'd a 63-day shoot. We'd eight days to go and we got shut down for two months. When we returned, protocols had changed and we had to the most interactive, intermingled for want of a better description part of the shoot," he explained.
You can watch Lee Cronin discussing the finale here:
"So, we had to change tact a little bit in how we did it but that was really, really time-consuming, really hard to prep.
"Because of the Covid situation, our team who had designed the monster - let's call it that for now - we're unable to travel from Australia to New Zealand.
"So, they were only able to send us the parts and the kit and all the stuff we'd prepped for months. Then, we had to find a local crew to come in and understand what it was we were trying to do.
"So, it was really really challenging - it was something that was on the agenda from day one of the prep and was never really off the agenda and then just trying to find away to make it work."
Adding to this difficulty were all the different filmmaking parts necessary to pulling off the climactic set piece.
"[The monster] required so many different [things] from motion control cameras to puppetry to stunt people to the cast themselves to literal like Mission: Impossible style fake faces to put on stunt people," he explained.
"I wouldn't say I wouldn't like to do it again but it was a serious undertaking."
Evil Dead Rise is in cinemas now.
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