Souheila Yacoub had never watched a single frame of the Evil Dead franchise, Sam Raimi’s long-running horror sequence in which Deadites – humans possessed by demons – wreak havoc, until recently.“I’m someone that’s pretty easily scared,” says the actor, who is now the star of Evil Dead Burn, the newest instalment in the series. “I have a very big phobia of broken bones and jump scares. When I discovered that I was going to be part of Evil Dead, I needed to do my research. But I tried to watch the second film, and it was too much.”A friend came to the rescue with a special PG edition to help Yacoub get up to speed with Deadite lore. “He made a cut that took out all the gore scenes and replaced them with pictures of puppies and kittens while he explained what happened during those missing scenes,” she says.Having made it through the Paris premiere of Evil Dead Burn, watching sometimes through her fingers, Yacoub, a star of Gaspar Noé’s Climax and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, has a new appreciation for the legacy. Forty-six years ago, when he was 20, Raimi and his collaborators Bruce Campbell and Robert Tapert headed to rural Tennessee to begin shooting the proof of concept for The Evil Dead. It was anything but a continuous production. Working with a shoestring budget, the young film-makers repeatedly stopped for months at a time, trading cameras for suits and briefcases as they knocked on investors’ doors to raise enough money to keep going.While the shoot stopped and started, the legacy it subsequently created has never paused. The scrappy 1981 horror film, made with homemade practical effects, gallons of improvised fake blood and relentless ingenuity, became one of independent cinema’s defining success stories, proving that ambition could outmatch resources. Its influence stretches far beyond its infamous cabin in the woods, spawning the sequels Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, various video games, comic books, a 2013 remake, the three-season television series Ash vs Evil Dead and a 2003 musical.Along the way, it helped establish the careers of Raimi and Campbell, gave Joel Coen an early editing credit and established a blueprint for guerrilla film-making that continues to inspire creatives decades later. Few films have turned so many production hardships into such an enduring – and chainsaw-happy – cinematic mythology.Evil Dead Rise, made by the Irish director Lee Cronin and released in 2023, was the first of three standalone adventures for Raimi’s Deadites. Francis Galluppi’s Evil Dead Wrath will hit cinemas in 2028. In the meantime, Sébastien Vanicek has delivered Evil Dead Burn, in which Yacoub’s heroine must weather the death of her abusive husband alongside his surviving family. To make a bad situation worse, one by one, her in-laws are transformed into Deadites.“I was really involved in the process of writing the character,” the Swiss actor says. “That was a beautiful thing from Sébastien. He said he wanted to do a feminist movie, and I needed to know what he meant by that. Because if it’s just because the subject is domestic violence, then I don’t care about that. “I said, ‘If you want to do a feminist movie, let’s write a complex and nuanced final girl’. Because I didn’t want to portray just a badass or just a victim. I wanted to be more than that. I wanted people to believe that Alice was at some point in love with the guy who abused her. We really took a long time to get her character right.”[ Olivia Wilde: ‘My family is all in Ireland right now. We still have the same house’Opens in new window ]That creative process extended to stunt choreography. Throughout a gruelling three-month shoot in New Zealand, Yacoub, an alumnus of the Swiss rhythmic-gymnastics team, worked closely with the veteran stuntman Clint Elvy, whose previous credits include Game of Thrones and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.“I didn’t want Alice to be good at fighting,” Yacoub says. “We just needed me, the actress, to be fit. The stunt co-ordinator, Clint, was amazing. As a gymnast, of course, I wanted to do as many stunts as I could, because I really enjoy it.”Starting with Fede Álvarez’s 2013 Evil Dead reboot, Evil Dead Burn is the third film in the sequence shot in New Zealand. The location, a favourite movie backdrop since Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, added to the general gloom.“Seb warned me before we went to New Zealand that it was going to be the hardest movie I’d ever done,” Yacoub says. “It was a really long and exhausting process. It was summer in Europe, and when you land in Auckland it’s back to winter. “The sun goes down at 4.30pm or 5pm in winter there. You’re at the end of the world. It’s 11 or 12 hours’ difference, so it’s very hard to reach your family in France or Switzerland. It took me a little bit of time not to feel lonely.”Born in Geneva in 1992 to a Tunisian father and a Flemish mother, Yacoub was originally destined for elite sport rather than the screen. She competed with the Swiss rhythmic-gymnastics team at the 2009 and 2010 World Championships, after leaving school at 16 to train full time. When Switzerland failed to qualify for the Olympics, she walked away from the sport entirely. She has subsequently spoken in support of former teammates who alleged abusive coaching practices and weight control within the national programme.“When I work on a character, the physicality comes first,” Yacoub says. “I get emotions very much from the way my body behaves, from the way my breathing behaves. This is before, sometimes, the words. It’s how my body feels that can help me bring emotions.”After returning from the national team, Yacoub won the Miss Suisse Romande title in 2012, a victory that earned her a scholarship to the Cours Florent drama school in Paris. She later trained at the French conservatory of dramatic art, before landing work on TV and on stage. Climax, Noé’s wild dance-horror from 2018, was her first film role. The largely improvised production introduced international audiences to Yacoub’s uninhibited, intensely physical style.[ The Invite review: Problems of privilege play out in a canny comedy of toxic luxury and uneaseOpens in new window ]“Gaspar doesn’t have any script,” she says. “He doesn’t have anything to tell us. We come every day on set, and we have no idea what we are filming. Then he comes and says, ‘Okay, you’re pregnant, but you don’t want to have a baby’. I was like, ‘What the hell?’ “So it was just a lot of improvisation. Gaspar was holding the camera and he was with us the whole night, all the time. The set was gorgeous. He’s the most sweet guy, even if that’s nothing like his movies.”Yacoub has subsequently crafted an impressive body of work among French film-festival favourites, including Philippe Garrel’s The Salt of Tears, Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children and Cédric Kahn’s Making Of. Her performances have earned her a place among the César Academy’s Révélations, a spot on Unifrance’s 10 to Watch, and a Hollywood break in Dune: Part Two, in which she played the formidable Fremen warrior Shishakli alongside Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya.“Denis Villeneuve is like Gaspar,” she says. “When they’re on set, they’re like kids. They’re enjoying so much what they’re doing, and they enjoy how we actors feel. They allow you to go to crazy emotional places.”Yacoub is especially proud of her collaborations with young female directors, including the actor-director Noémie Merlant for the anarchic feminist comedy-horror The Balconettes, cowritten by Céline Sciamma, and Aude Léa Rapin’s dystopian sci-fi drama Planet B, opposite Adèle Exarchopoulos.“For The Balconettes, my character is naked all the time,” she says. “When it’s hot, men walk around without a T-shirt. I really wanted that for my character as well. If it’s hot, well, her boobs are out. “But I wanted people to treat it like it’s normal. So of course, when you have a woman filming this, it’s somehow easier to find the freedom in my naked body. At some point I could just walk around naked between takes, and it wasn’t a problem. I felt good.”Evil Dead Burn is in cinemas from Thursday, July 9th