Demon

Heard about that fresh new wave of horror dominating the box office and charming even the snootiest of critics?

“Evil Dead Burn” — less an inferno than a partly scorched reheating — isn’t that. Director Sam Raimi’s original 1981 “The Evil Dead,” filmed in the Tennessee woods by a bunch of hyperactive dreamers, has since morphed into a monolithic franchise that mainly serves to keep the lights on. Some foundational elements remain: wobbly camera sprints through the forest, demons with a smiling love of bodily destruction. But the house feels dormant.

Sébastien Vaniček, a French filmmaker of vigor if not vibrancy, is the fourth director to pick up the series, now on its sixth installment. It’s hard to know from his palette what thrills him, or if he sees colors at all, given the film’s muddy, deadening grayscape. (A softly falling snow, almost mocking of the action to come, is a nice touch.) Vaniček knows where his movie needs to end up — a sloppy showdown in a home with a lot of power tools lying around — but sometimes he lingers, adding transient curiosity to a serviceable story.

A tense family coalesces around the memorial of its eldest son, cut down in the prime of what seems like an argument-leaden life. Mainly, we focus on Alice (Souheila Yacoub), his bruised foreign-born widow, a black sheep among them who doesn’t have any words to offer at the service. Already, they all hate each other, but what they don’t know is that younger failson Joseph (Hunter Doohan), a wannabe writer, has been busy going through his grandfather’s notes concerning the Book of the Dead, unwittingly summoning vicious spirits to a fractious dynamic.

These people shouldn’t be around each other, but whereas a mightier movie like “Hereditary” would simmer that grief into a boiling pot of bad behavior, “Evil Dead Burn” has something more obvious and darkly funny in mind. The spirits (we call them Deadites in this universe) slip into a human host, we see a telltale contraction of the irises, and it’s off to the races.

The gore comes like a tide, shockingly for a mainstream studio wide release. Vaniček is clearly inspired by the extremity that has marked so much horror from France over the last two decades, in notorious exports such as “High Tension” and “Martyrs.” But it’s also show-offy and ill-considered: When a family dog receives a furious fork-stabbing, it’s hard to know who the film is for. Elsewhere, heads are exploded by guns, cleaved and gashed, though not so irretrievably that a possessed couple can’t enjoy a long lip-lock (“You haven’t kissed me like that in years,” a partner says, her mouth bloodied).

As it goes on, “Evil Dead Burn” itself feels possessed by a kind of narrative impatience: Can’t we just get to the good stuff? Raimi was capable of shapelier storytelling than this. These reboots in his name — on which, it should be said, he is a producer — somewhat demean his legacy by reducing “Evil Dead” to a viscera delivery device. I can’t say the audience I saw it with was particularly juiced.

But a loopy grandma (Maude Davey), stricken with dementia, gets her licks in via a brutally deployed fountain pen that is notably not used for writing. There’s a hint in that. This movie is not for those who want anything beyond a steak served blue.

Diversity in last year’s streaming films followed the same downward trend as theatrical releases, a new study found, with the percentage of people of color directing, writing and leading films diminishing.

In past years, streaming was considered a more accessible outlet for early-career female or BIPOC filmmakers, which was reflected in data about gender and racial representation. According to Part 2 of UCLA’s 2026 Hollywood Diversity Report, which was released Wednesday and analyzed all of the original English-language films distributed on major streaming platforms in 2025, that trend reversed across every category studied.

The share of streaming films directed by women declined to just over 23%, the lowest it’s been since 2022, when the annual study began analyzing streaming and theatrical films separately. Among those female directors, an overwhelming majority (81%) were allotted budgets below $20 million, while more than a quarter of the films directed by white men exceeded $50 million.

Only about 31% of streaming films last year had BIPOC directors, down 10% since 2024, when the proportion more closely reflected U.S. demographics.

“This is an industry in flux — and in reverse, especially when it comes to diversification,” Darnell Hunt, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost and the report’s co-founder, said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, as we’ve seen with theatrical films, we’re now seeing the impact of this current political climate in very meaningful and concrete ways,” he continued. “As budgets tighten, opportunities for filmmakers of underrepresented backgrounds are always the first to be squeezed out.”

Despite losing ground behind the scenes and in front of the camera, women and people of color continued to drive streaming viewership in 2025, the report found.

The year’s biggest streaming hit, “KPop Demon Hunters,” was also the most-watched original Netflix film of all time, and according to Neilsen ratings, it was most streamed by women in Latinx households, followed by women in Asian and Black households. The report acknowledged the film as a “bright spot” in a disappointing year for diversity.

Michael Tran, a sociologist who co-authored the report, noted that the film’s impact and earnings potential could have been even greater with a theatrical release.

“It was a missed opportunity for theaters,” Tran said. “We’ve tracked how diverse films tend to succeed at the box office, here and abroad. For ‘KPop Demon Hunters,’ we could have been talking about record-breaking box office receipts in addition to topping the ratings.”

When “KPop Demon Hunters” did briefly screen in theaters — for two days last August, with over 1,750 locations domestically and more than 1,150 sold-out screenings — it was the No. 1 movie that weekend, earning about $18 million in ticket sales (though Netflix does not report exact box office figures).

Data from the report also indicated that streaming films with at least somewhat diverse casts tended to outperform in terms of audience and social media engagement.

However, overall cast diversity in streaming films declined in 2025. For the first time since 2022, films with a majority-BIPOC cast did not represent the plurality of streaming titles. Most notably, the percentage of lead actors of color dropped from a high of 51% in 2024 to 36% in 2025.

Report authors called it an “industry-wide chilling effect” reminiscent of a similar decline in diversity among theatrical films in 2024. That said, streaming films continued to star BIPOC leads more often than their theatrical counterparts, the study found.

The overall number of streaming films also declined. While the annual UCLA report typically examines the top 100 original, English-language movies across streaming platforms, this time, there were only 89 for researchers to analyze.

In addition to studying race and gender demographics in the film industry, the report also examined on-camera representations of disability. According to the study, while adults with a disability make up at least 26% of the U.S. population, actors with a known disability represented 6.5% of total streaming movie actors, which is in line with the previous year.

According to the study’s authors, streamers hoping to compete in a fast-paced, globalized market should increase their diversity efforts in light of these results.

“Kids under 18 are already majority BIPOC. There’s no going back if a studio wants to be profitable and relevant to Gen Z and Gen Alpha,” said report co-founder and co-author Ana-Christina Ramón. “Severing all brand loyalty now will only make it more difficult to regain long-term subscribers in the future.”