Actress Alyssa Sutherland, best known for her role as Ellie in the fifth and sixth instalments of the Evil Dead franchise, just broke her silence on what horror fans have been buzzing about since Evil Dead Burn‘s opening weekend. She’s officially back — a secret that she’s apparently kept for many months.
Sutherland posted a selfie-to-mirror transformation reel on Instagram. The video begins with the actress smiling and then moving past a light and finally to a mirror when she’s turned into her Evil Dead Rise Deadite alter ego. The video is captioned: “Probably the longest I’ve ever kept a secret. If you haven’t seen Evil Dead Burn yet, what are you waiting for?! Stick around after the credits…” She also tagged it #EvilDeadBurn and #MaggotMommy — a nod to Ellie’s most quoted line from Rise.
Evil Dead Burn actually has two post-credits scenes. The mid-credits one gives the family grandmother a grim gag. But the second one, set back at the crematorium featured earlier in the film, shows a young girl idly reading nametags on unclaimed urns. She sees one marked Ellie Bixler. She looks into a nearby mirror, and the Deadite Ellie is staring back.
It’s a stinger that shocked many fans of the franchise. “Fave part,” commented one fan under Sutherland’s Instagram post. “You are easily one of the best characters in the entire franchise! Really hope you’re back in full force in the next movie after Wrath! Please come back!” wrote another.
For those who remember, Ellie was very thoroughly dismembered at the end of Rise — she was put through a wood chipper. You don’t easily come back from that, or do you? That’s probably a question that will get answered in the films that follow. Deadites have always worked by possessing bodies, not haunting them as ghosts, so this was genuinely a surprise.
Director Rodo Sayagues (working from a story credited to the Rise team) has said the coda was the studio’s call, not his. That suggests that New Line has bigger plans for Ellie in future films.
But the next confirmed Evil Dead film, Evil Dead Wrath, a 1972-set prequel from director Francis Galluppi, is only due in April 2028. That’s a long way away. Until then, fans will have to keep guessing how or why Alyssa Sutherland’s Ellie has returned.
In the meantime, revisit our Evil Dead Burn review, find out about the scene so brutal it had to be cut for an R rating, relive the film’s infamous dishwasher scene, or read how the shoot left star Erroll Shand desensitised to real-life gore.
