There’s a new Evil Dead movie coming out this summer, “Evil Dead Burn,” but it has yet to receive an MPA rating due to a problematic scene that would warrant an NC-17 rating.
In an interview with SFX magazine, “Evil Dead Burn” director Sébastien Vaniček says he now has to cut the scene to adhere to studio demands for an R rating.
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.
At the time of the interview, Vaniček was in the middle of a new cut for the MPA. He declined to reveal what the scene contained, but given the franchise’s long-standing taste for graphic violence, it was likely something extreme.
The previous entry, “Evil Dead Rise,” featured a possessed character scraping their face with a cheese grater, while Evil Dead (2013) included a scene in which a girl severed her own arm with an electric carving knife. Despite their gruesome content, both films still secured an R rating in the United States.
Vaniček does mention a director’s cut of “Evil Dead Burn” potentially coming down the line: “The director’s cut will be way more violent than what we will have in the theater.”
A similar situation occurred with Curry Barker’s “Obsession,” which was initially given an NC-17 rating by the MPA due to a memorable scene involving Nikki smashing another girl’s head against a steering wheel. “There were about six or seven more [head] smashes,” Barker said. “And we were getting an NC-17 rating. So they were like, you’ve got to take out some of the smashes. And I was like, I’m not taking out a single bash. But I did.”
“Evil Dead Burn,” the sixth film in the franchise and a standalone story, follows Alice (Souheila Yacoub), who, after the death of her husband, retreats to a secluded home with her in-laws. Family members soon begin becoming possessed.
The film is slated for July 22, 2026.