With horror fans becoming more and more desensitized to gore, filmmakers have had to push the limits with more gruesome bloodier deaths over the years. But that push has definitely impacted the actors in the films, too. Based on his reaction to seeing a photo of a genuinely awful injury of a family member, it’s clear that Erroll Shand, who plays Edgar Price in Evil Dead Burn, has built a strong resistance to gore.
“For most people, if you saw a picture of that, this is how up our industry is. How you perceive a picture of that, you would go, ‘Oh my god, this is intense. I feel gross. I want to spew.’ For me, I saw the picture of her finger all mangled up, right? And I went, ‘Oh, that’s incredible work.'”
Being on the set of Evil Dead Burn, a film that promises to be one of 2026’s goriest horrors,will probably do that to you. Shand isn’t making light of the injury. He’s just explaining, honestly, that all the blood and prosthetics did a number on his brain.
Before Evil Dead Burn, the New Zealand actor who previously appeared in Deathgasm, another gnarly, comedic horror, built his career on this subgenre within horror. “We do blood really well down here. We do horror really well down here. We do stunts really well. So it’s like a perfect mix of a place to come and create a horror film.”
Evil Dead Burn is Sébastien Vaniček’s first entry into the franchise, and Shand describes the film as something rooted more in the human side of the story than the demonic one. While he’s careful not to give too much away, he does say the film pushes into territory the earlier Evil Dead movies never quite touched. “There’s at least a handful of moments and sequences within this film that people would just go, ‘WTF?'”
And given his own experience with horror, we know that isn’t a small claim.
One of those moments is a single continuous shot in Evil Dead Burn that Shand still seems a little stunned by. The plan going in was to do three takes, with one camera, in one continuous, unbroken sequence. “It’s a hell of a dance by all the characters that are playing it out, and you’ll see it,” he said, describing how many people it took to keep that one shot working for what felt like several minutes straight. Three takes turned into more than three, mostly because every failed attempt meant rebuilding an entire house set from scratch before they could try again. “That house that’s in there had to be reset back, obviously, to redo it again and again,” he said.
In the same interview with Reel Appreciation, Shand goes into his experience working with dark and violent characters for months at a time. He confesses that the work does sometimes leave something behind, but he shakes it off with exercise, music, time outdoors and walking his dog. “You got to hang in there, but far out, you know, every day is different. So you just got to take it one step at a time,” Shand said when the conversation steered towards mental wellness.
What’s also interesting is how deliberately Shand separates the characters he plays, like Edgar Price, from himself once the cameras stop. He brought up Ricky Gervais’s bit about Ian McKellen switching between Gandalf and Saruman mid-conversation, and used it to explain his own process of stepping fully into a role and then stepping fully back out again. It also explains why he was such a good fit to play Edgar Price in one of 2026’s bloodiest horror films.
If months on Evil Dead Burn were enough to make Shand mistake a real injury for prosthetic makeup, audiences might finally be getting an Evil Dead film capable of shocking even seasoned horror fans.
Evil Dead Burn opens July 10.
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