Sébastien Vaniček, the Evil Dead Burn director who kept his banlieue crew

Sébastien Vaniček

Photo: VincentZafra / Illusion Story / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 19, 1989 Nogent-sur-Marne, France
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	Evil Dead Burn, Infested
Awards	Sitges Film Festival Special Jury Prize (shared) · Fantastic Fest Best Director, Horror Features

In the familiar version of the Hollywood story, a French genre debut gets noticed, a studio calls, and the director disappears into somebody else’s machine. Sébastien Vaniček has spent the past few years refusing that version. He said no to finished scripts, insisted on co-writing the new chapter of Sam Raimi‘s horror franchise with his usual writing partner, and took his regular technicians, several of them friends since childhood, to the other side of the world to shoot it. Now that Evil Dead Burn has played in cinemas and moved to streaming, the question his career is asking is whether that loyalty is a signature or a limit.

The loyalty has an address. Vaniček grew up in Noisy-le-Grand, in Seine-Saint-Denis, in the Pavé-Neuf quarter beside the Arènes de Picasso, the circular housing blocks of the eastern suburbs. His family has Czech roots, which explains the háček in his surname. Seeing Ridley Scott’s Gladiator as a boy made him want to direct. He began filming with a digital stills camera, then with the family camcorder, and by his late teens he was writing, shooting and cutting shorts with friends from the estate.

Vaniček, who was born on 19 August 1989 in Nogent-sur-Marne, just east of Paris, passed through university and a film school without staying long in either. He learned mostly by doing, and paid the rent with jobs in a supermarket in Noisy and at Disneyland Paris. In 2012 he self-produced Marave Nachave, a film of roughly fifty minutes about a boxer. A meeting with the producer and screenwriter Étienne Ement led to Mayday in 2015, a short co-written with Mathieu Abes that travelled the festival circuit and won prizes.

Crocs, in 2018, is the project he describes as his first fully professional one: a short about dog fighting starring Olivier Barthélémy, backed by the Hauts-de-France region, France 2 and the CNC. When the pandemic slowed production he moved online, directing the comic actor Jérôme Niel in Pas Bouger and Zer in 2021 and Holo in 2022. Through all of it the same faces kept turning up behind the camera. Childhood friends had become a cinematographer, a sound engineer and a stuntman, and the crew he assembled in those years is largely the one that followed him into features.

Vermines began in November 2021 as the idea for another short, in which three friends have to cross a tower block overrun by spiders. His producer encouraged him to turn it into a feature. Written with Florent Bernard and produced by Harry Tordjman, it was shot in 2022 on home ground, in the Pavé-Neuf and inside the Arènes de Picasso, with residents, local teenagers and neighbourhood associations working in front of and behind the camera. Théo Christine plays Kaleb, a young man obsessed with exotic animals whose newest acquisition escapes and multiplies through the building. Vaniček wanted the spiders read as a metaphor: the reflexive disgust they provoke mirrors the prejudice much of France directs at people from the banlieue, and the film folds in tense relations with the police, the feeling of a territory written off, and the solidarity that holds a block together under siege.

The film premiered in 2023 at Venice Critics’ Week, the independent section that runs alongside the Mostra. It went on to share the Special Jury Prize at Sitges and to take the horror awards for best film and best director at Fantastic Fest in Austin. Made for about five million euros, it sold 268,940 tickets in France and earned three César nominations, among them best first film. In the United States it went out on Shudder as Infested, and Stephen King praised it publicly.

That American run brought studio offers, and he turned down every finished script among them. In October 2023 Warner Bros., New Line Cinema and Ghost House Pictures asked him to develop a new Evil Dead film from scratch. He and Bernard wrote a fifteen-page document setting out the story and the characters, and he met Raimi in Los Angeles that November. The arrangement, announced in February 2024, let him co-write the screenplay with Bernard, bring his regular technicians and carry out post-production in France, and Raimi, as producer, gave him wide creative latitude. Evil Dead Burn was shot in New Zealand between July and October 2025, a stay of about six months for the director, on a production budget of around twenty million dollars. Souheila Yacoub leads as a widow staying with her late husband’s family at their country house, where the relatives soon turn into Deadites, alongside Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan and Tandi Wright. Through her character, Vaniček said, he wanted to deal with domestic violence and toxic relationships.

The reception was split, and the split is instructive. In The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney praised the visual energy, the practical effects and Yacoub’s performance but found the story conventional and the violence poorly modulated. Le Monde saw a film full of rage and invention, made by a director who turns household objects into weapons and gives the gore an intimate core of coercive control, family rejection and grief; Télérama credited him with a feminist turn and a heroine more substantial than horror usually allows. The box office told its own story. Released in France on 8 July 2026 and in the United States two days later, the film opened well below Evil Dead Rise, the previous chapter, and has taken about 72 million dollars worldwide against its 20 million budget, comfortably above cost but roughly half of what Evil Dead Rise earned. The awkward part of the argument is that what got him hired was specificity, a real housing estate with real neighbours and a social reading rooted in one suburb. A family house under siege in New Zealand offers none of that, and the critics who found Evil Dead Burn conventional were, in effect, noticing what the franchise had asked him to leave at home.

Evil Dead Burn began streaming on HBO Max on 2 October 2026. Vaniček has not announced his next film. Asked during a Reddit AMA in July which property he would most like to adapt, he named The Mask, saying he would want it closer to the original comics, which he called very, very violent and dark, than to the Jim Carrey comedy. It was a wish, not a deal.

Whatever comes next, the test is the one he set himself when he turned down those finished scripts: whether a director who made his name filming his own neighbourhood can carry its people, and its point of view, into stories that are not set there.

Tags: Sam Raimi, Evil Dead Burn, Souheila Yacoub, Sébastien Vaniček, Infested, Théo Christine