#Gamers #EvilDeadRise Has A Killer Title Card:

 

Like the Evil Dead, the title card must rise.

This article contains spoilers for the opening scene of Evil Dead Rise.

Evil Dead Rise starts in the woods, with a fun gory opening that feels like a piece with the rest of the franchise. But it has to get to the apartment building namechecked in the title (Get it? High-rise) at some point, and it does so by ending the sequence with a killer title card that hits like a mic drop.

As the movie begins, we meet a couple of twentysomethings, Teresa and Caleb, hanging out on a dock by a lake in the woods. We learn that a third friend, Jessica, is sick in the ominous A-frame cabin nearby. When Teresa goes to check on her, Jess goes Deadite and scalps her. Teresa runs back down to the lake, the top of her head can-opened off, but before she can tell Caleb, Jess appears and decapitates him with the drone he was flying in the opening, which provided a modern recreation of the trademark shaky POV shot Raimi pioneered in the first Evil Dead.

After dispatching Caleb, Jessica rises into the air above the lake. Then, the words EVIL DEAD RISE slide into the frame around her. It’s an instantly iconic shot that starts the movie off on a high note, but also points in the direction we’ll be headed: up. The Deadite Jessica rises above the water, the title rises behind her, and she kills Caleb with a flying machine. Everything about the sequence suggests that Evil Dead is bidding the ground adieu.

Just as importantly, it looks great and feels electric. I love when a title card can simultaneously provide a satisfying conclusion to everything that’s happened so far and hype the audience up for everything that will follow. Sometimes, this kind of moment can take on added weight because of how late it hits, as in Drive My Car where the opening credits don't play until 40 minutes in. In games, Ghost of Tsushima is an especially striking example, with the title showing up as samurai Jin Sakai rides through a gorgeous field as the flowers around him whirl in the wind.

And sometimes a title card lands hard just because of how stylish it is. Quentin Tarantino’s movies often do this, and when I was a high school student getting into movies seriously for the first time, it was one of the really clear and obvious signifiers that a person had made the movie I was watching and given it their fingerprints. A title card doesn’t need to exist within the world, it’s one of the few things in a film that can exist purely nondiagetically, as an expression of mood and intent.

That’s the case in Evil Dead Rise as well. It feels like a mic drop because director Lee Cronin composes the filmed frame with the title card he will add later in mind. The font is jagged and blood red. The letters fill the top half of the screen in its entirety, but frame the lower half where the Deadite is floating menacingly above the water. It sets up where the movie is headed, from the ground where the series has always been set, to up into the air. Despite the strength of the opening, there’s literally nowhere to go but up for Evil Dead Rise.