Posted by Evil Dead Rise is the 2023 installment of the Evil Dead franchise, created by Sam Raimi in the 80s. The movie introduces new characters and stories but contains some elements related to the other films. In particular, those elements can answer one of the questions people had about Evil Dead Rise: what is the demon summoned in the movie, and what’s the story of the Naturom Demonto, the book discovered in the beginning? Let’s have everything explained here.
You can watch the official trailer for Evil Dead Rise here on Youtube.
Evil Dead Rise: what is the Naturom Demonto, and what’s the summoned demon?
In the plot of the 2023 movie Evil Dead Rise, we see a heartquake hitting a building in Los Angeles. After the heartquake, a hole opens up in the basement parking lot. Danny, one of Ellie’s children, inspects what’s under the basement, finding an ancient book and some old vinyl records. Once he’s home, he plays one of the records, and the voice of an old priest fills the room, reciting an incantation that summons a terrible demon.
In Dead Evil Rise, the book is called the Naturom Demonto. It’s a recurring element in the Evil Dead franchise. Alternatively called “Book of Dead,” or “Necronomicon Ex-Mortis,” it basically appears in every movie of the saga. The inspiration comes from H. P. Lovecraft, who described the Necronomicon in some of his works. After Lovecraft, the Necronomicon became the symbol of a book that allows one to speak with demons from another world. And the Evil Dead franchise introduced it in the stories of each movie. You can find a long explanation of the story of this book on this dedicated page on the Evil Dead fandom.
In the context of the Evil Dead movies, the demon summoned by the Book of the Dead, the Naturom Demonto, is the Kandarian demon. Also known as “The Watcher In The Woods,” the Kandarian demon unleashes the Deadites, which are precisely the demonic spirits that feed on human souls. The vinyl record played by Danny in Evil Dead Rise summoned the Kandarian demon, which then attacked all family members.
As explained by the priest in the vinyl record, the Deadites cannot be destroyed. What Beth does at the ending of the movie is destroy the body of the demon by pushing it into a wood chipper. But the demon is not dead: Jessica, the neighbor who accesses the parking lot the morning after, is attacked by the demon, leading to the events we see in the movie’s opening scene: Jessica will kill her friends in the lake, possessed by the same demon summoned by Danny while playing the record reciting the Naturom Demonto.
This means that the Evil Dead saga can still have more chapters, of course: the demon is out there, perfectly able to attack humans. And it seems impossible to defeat it.
