Evil Dead Rise's Lee Cronin Wasn't Worried About Pushing The Film's R Rating Too Far

While "Evil Dead Rise" doesn't have any boisterous, Bruce Campbell-like "This is my boomstick!" moments — it does, however, squeeze in a "come get some" reference — it appears that writer-director Lee Cronin's sense of playfulness did help the film avoid an NC-17 rating.

"Evil Dead Rise," of course, is the latest in the film series that kicked off in 1981 with "The Evil Dead," which starred Campbell and was directed by Sam Raimi and produced by Rob Tapert. The common denominator of all "Evil Dead" chapters was that the horror and gore were always extreme. Naturally, when any film pushes the limits of horror, they're subject to being slapped with an NC-17 rating over an R, but Cronin revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that landing an R rating for "Evil Dead Rise" was always a sure thing.

"I feel like we maybe had to trim a couple of seconds, but that was it," Cronin told THR in an interview for the film's digital video and streaming release on Max. "So, it was never, 'You're NC-17 and you've gotta do all these things.' There were just one or two tiny notes, and a lot of people are surprised that it did get that rating so easily."

Also helping the ratings case for "Evil Dead Rise" was the core of the movie's narrative. "Although it's violent and crazy at times with a lot of blood and gore, there is a little bit of a playfulness to how that is on screen," Cronin said. "So, it's not grim or sinister in that way."

Fans of "The Evil Dead" already know it's a straight-up horror film, while its sequels — "Evil Dead II" and "Army of Darkness" — kept the scares coming but added a comedic tone. Fede Álvarez got back to the saga's original horror roots with his "Evil Dead" remake, while Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert, and Bruce Campbell brought on the funny again with "Ash vs. Evil Dead."

For "Evil Dead Rise," Raimi and Campbell took on executive producer duties while Tapert worked closely with Lee Cronin as the film's main producer. Unlike his Three Stooges-loving predecessors, Cronin opted to travel down the hardcore horror route for "Evil Dead Rise," but instituted a set of limitations to ensure the film an R rating. "I remember saying to Rob on set, 'I'm gonna stick the knife in, but I'm not gonna stay there forever while it twists around and around, cutting back to screams,'" the filmmaker told The Hollywood Reporter. "I just wanted the movie to have energy and momentum, and that probably helped the cause. I didn't gaze at it for too long to make it feel uncomfortable."

One area that Cronin wasn't going to hold back on was the amount of fake blood he was going to use in the film — a staple in the "Evil Dead" saga from the beginning.

Beginning with a jolting scene reminiscent of the haunting cabin in the woods setting in the first two films, "Evil Dead Rise" largely take place in a dilapidated, suburban Los Angeles high-rise apartment building where a single mother, Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), lives with her three children. During a visit from Ellie's estranged sister, Beth (Lily Sullivan), an earthquake rattles the building and tears a hole open in its foundation.

After the earthquake, Ellie's curious teen son, Danny (Morgan Davies), ventures into the previously sealed-off area of the building and discovers a Necronomicon, aka "The Book of Dead," along with some vinyl recordings that accompanied it. Playing the incantations on one of the recordings, Danny unleashes an unseen, demonic force that first takes possession of his mother.

From that point in the film, the gore kicks into high gear, which includes, naturally, a scene where there's a bloody flood. It happens in the film's climactic elevator scene in a shot akin to the one in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror classic "The Shining." Thankfully, as Lee Cronin explained to The Hollywood Reporter, it was done in one take.

"The cleanup would take about eight hours, and so if we didn't get it the first time, we would clean up and then shoot it again at the end of the day. But we got it in the first pass," Cronin told the outlet. "We used three or four cameras, because it's such a big, expensive moment. I'm not a huge multi-camera person unless I really need to do it. I like to keep the focus on one camera, but in this case, it made sense."

Lee Cronin told The Hollywood Reporter that there was naturally a lot of preparation for the elevator scene, which was rehearsed with volumes of H2O. Still, the director noted that fake blood, while artificial, is still thicker than water.

"There was always this lingering fear that the viscosity and the behavior and the physics of the blood would be a little different to what it was like with water," Cronin recalled. "So, we definitely crossed our fingers, and then it was all over in a flash. I was like, 'Oh s***, we got it. We have it.' So, that made for a fun day of shooting thereafter because we weren't thinking about cleanup and having to go back and do it again."

Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert were impressed with Cronin's bloody new vision for "Evil Dead Rise," and they told Looper in an exclusive interview how they were confident that he understood their horror film sensibilities from the beginning. "So, as Rob says, it wasn't a giant surprise when we saw the dailies being very effective with what felt like an authentic 'Evil Dead' flavor to them," Raimi explained.

Raimi did have one major request of the filmmaker regarding the early "Evil Dead" films, though, as he informed Cronin he wanted as few Easter eggs as possible in "Evil Dead Rise."

"I wanted Lee to have complete ownership of this film and take us on his fever dream," Raimi said of his desire to cut down on the fan service. "I didn't want him to wave at the audience saying, 'Hey, guys. Like you, I'm aware of the previous films,' and take them out of the moment. I was actually encouraging Lee to go with as few as possible."