Every Evil Dead film has its own Necronomicon – and Rise is no different. This one boasts veins, teeth, and a fresh batch of fucked-up illustrations. “It's sitting on my shelf right here!” says Cronin, clearly delighted. “It's wrapped up in cellophane waiting for a glass box to keep it in.” As soon as pre-production kicked off, work began on building the book that begets the bloodshed. “We probably worked on it for three months,” the director reveals. “It's all completely hand-made, hand-drawn. It's got a different visual style to what you've seen before internally. I even brought in little hints of Celtic influences and different things to give it a hell of a lot of personality. It's the bastard cousin of the other books, and they're the bastard cousin of this.”
While Raimi’s films never had a neat sense of continuity, the new Necronomicon does raise the question of where exactly Evil Dead Rise is set – is it in the same world as the original film, or the 2013 remake, or a different timeline altogether? “There are connections to the past, lines are drawn,” teases a tight-lipped Cronin. “In one of the early meetings I had with Sam Raimi, I said, ‘You know the way in Army Of Darkness, there's three [Necronomicons]? You had one, Fede had one, I'm going to take the other one.’ It gave me that platform to nudge things forward, and also to showcase that we live in a world where there is more than one copy of the Necronomicon. Those books may all have slightly different personalities – it's not exactly the same book, necessarily, that Ash had in the cabin. But it's very, very firmly related. It could even be more dangerous…”
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