‘Evil Dead Rise’ Director Used 1,700 Gallons of Blood to Make the Year’s Goriest Movie: ‘I Wanted Blood to Be a Character’
variety.comWilliam Earl Lee Cronin is very particular about blood. Cronin, the Irish writer and director of “Evil Dead Rise,” the fifth feature installment in the cult horror series, lights up when discussing gore on set. “We used 6,500 liters [1,717 gallons] of blood on the movie,” he said. “That is real, sticky, cooked movie blood.
We had to hire out this industrial kitchen to cook the blood and keep it fresh, be able to heat it up, because characters are covered in it.
There was a lot of management of liquid in this movie. I wanted blood to be a character, so it was important we got the viscosity and look just right.” Beyond that, Cronin was keen to keep every element of the produc- tion top-notch, given the legacy of Sam Raimi’s series.
Before Raimi was a blockbuster name, helming the “Spider-Man” trilogy of the 2000s and VFX-heavy projects like 2022’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” he got his start directing the 1981 microbudget hit “The Evil Dead.” Focusing on Dead-ites (demons that inhabit bodies) that are unleashed by reading from a version of the Book of the Dead, the malleable premise spawned two direct sequels, a spinoff series, a 2013 reboot, video games, comic books and even a musical.
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