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EXCLUSIVE: After signing rising filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček, CAA has helmed him win a coveted assignment, as the co-writer and director of a new spin-off of the Evil Dead franchise for Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert’s Ghost House Pictures.

Details as to the film’s plot are under wraps. The Evil Dead is of course the horror comedy franchise created by Raimi, going back to 1981’s same-name film starring Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams, a combatant of various supernatural entities. That pic grew into a trilogy, also spurring the creation of Starz TV series Ash vs. Evil Dead and a number of other projects over the years. The most recent, standalone film Evil Dead Rise from writer-director Lee Cronin, grossed more than $147M worldwide last year when it hit theaters via Warner Bros, after world premiering at SXSW.

Vaniček made his feature directorial debut last year with Infested (Vermines), a horror pic first introduced as part of the Critics’ Week sidebar at the Venice Film Festival. Watching as the residents of a rundown French apartment building battle against an army of deadly, rapidly reproducing spiders, the film won Best Picture and Best Director in its North American premiere at Fantastic Fest, and was also invited to the Sitges Film Festival, where it earned a nomination for Best Motion Picture and won a Special Jury Prize.

Other credits for Vaniček include the shorts Crocs, Mayday, and 299 792 458 M/S. He continues to be represented by Carla Zeller and Elsa Huisman at Studio 112, the French management company that works with top European artists including directors’ collective La Horde, contemporary artist Claire Tabouret, and Les Misérables helmer Ladj Ly.

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Evil Dead Rise director Lee Cronin admitted to Den of Geek he got the idea from a shot in Army of Darkness, in which Ash finds the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis alongside two other books. In his head canon, this pointed to three different Books: the Naturom Demonto, the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, and the Book of the Dead.

Rise involves the last of those three, which Cronin called the “bastard cousin” of the other two, thanks to its Celtic, instead of Sumerian or Egyptian, aspects. “They might have slightly different edges to them in terms of what they can do, and there’s a little subtle change or two to the incantations,” Cronin explained. More importantly, the three books “open up the door for more Evil Dead stories moving forward by changing it up.”

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