The story behind Evil Dead Rise ‘s grossest moment: the cheese grater
Warning: This article contains spoilers from Evil Dead Rise.
The most disgusting moment in writer-director Lee Cronin’s just-released, gore-drenched Evil Dead Rise occurs with a typical kitchen accoutrement. Gabrielle Echols’ demonically possessed teenager Bridget slams a cheese grater onto the calf of her aunt Beth (Lily Sullivan) and scrapes away a hefty chunk of flesh.
It’s enough to put you off Parmesan for life!
After this very disturbing image was included in the film’s trailer, the moment instantly became the talk of the horror community and pretty much anyone else who saw it, much to Cronin’s delight.
“I knew people would enjoy it. I didn’t realize it would become the meme that it has become from the moment that trailer dropped, but I’m happy with that,” says the Irish filmmaker. “It’s fun in a movie to have something [like that], to see some of the artwork that people have created around it, to have found myself outside screenings signing cheese graters for people.”
Warner Bros. Pictures Lily Sullivan in ‘Evil Dead Rise’
Cronin was inspired to have a cheese greater feature in his horror sequel while writing the Evil Dead Rise screenplay during lockdown.
“It was driven by me writing the screenplay during the first phase of COVID, and being locked in my apartment, and being told not to go outside your front door,” he says. “I felt quite claustrophobic, but what it did do was make me look around the domestic space maybe more than I first intended to when I was writing the screenplay.”
Cronin knew he wanted to stage a horrific fight scene in a kitchen setting. “Being Irish, the kitchen is the heart of the home, even in the context of an apartment,” the filmmaker explains. “I had the bones of the dialogue and the metaphorical qualities of what the possessed Bridget is saying to Beth, and where we are in the story. I just knew that I was missing something.”
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He wanted something “particularly visceral outside of a physical struggle between…
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