'Evil Dead Rise' director Lee Cronin says film's intense violence and bloody gore almost landed it an NC-17 rating

For a movie that features a gruesome scalping in its opening minutes and other extremes like volcanic vomiting, eyeball chompin, and possessed killers attempting to extract an unborn baby from a pregnant woman's body, Evil Dead Rise got little pushback from the studio behind it.

The script "stopped other studios in their tracks," writer-director Lee Cronin says. But New Line Cinema, the distributor that first unleashed Sam Raimi's storied franchise on the world with 1981's terrifying The Evil Dead, was in full support of Cronin's grisly vision.

"There's a heritage and an understanding of what makes things inherently scary inside that studio," Cronin tells Yahoo Entertainment in a new interview. "There was never really was a 'tone it down' conversation at all. I think it might disappoint people down the line, but there's no director's cut of this movie where I had to leave a bunch of really extra gory or frightening stuff on the floor. I actually got to put the movie out there that I wanted to put out there, which was something that was really great."

It might also be why audiences reacted so feverishly to the film, the fifth in the series — and its highest grossing yet. Centering around a family in a derelict Los Angeles apartment building who come face-to-face with a Deadite and The Marauder when kids unearth The Book of the Dead in a vault under the parking garage, Rise earned over $146 million on a budget of less than $20 million after its April release.

"In the case of New Line, once they were on board with the idea that this would be about family and that also that the evil would target young kids or young people, once you cross that line with the story, you had to be all in at that stage," the Irish filmmaker says.

The only tweaks Cronin had to tinker with, he explains, were to made to secure only an R rating, as opposed to an NC-17, which can spell box office poison.

"There were a couple of very, very minor [changes], I'm talking less than two seconds worth of material to hit our or rating," he says. "I think we were right on the edge [and had to make cuts] just around the infamous wood chipper sequence. There was [nothing] to the detriment of the movie in any way.

"There was always the fear that we would cross over that line and then it kind of becomes slightly unmarketable property [with an NC-17], but we seem to straddle that line just about perfectly. It's a pretty hard, pretty hard in its rating and it doesn't pull its punches in any way."

There's also the film's copious amount of blood.

In what's almost become a badge of honor for horror filmmakers in recent years, Cronin is acutely aware of just how much fake blood they used for the production, though he clarifies he needed to know purely for supply and demand.

"We ended up at 6,500 liters," the director says, which equates to over 1,700 gallons. (That's still shy of his predecessor, Fede álvarez’s 2013 reboot The Evil Dead, which utilized somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 gallons, making it the bloodiest film on record after passing other films like The Shining, Dead Alive, The Cabin the Woods, and It: Chapter 2.)

"It was a lot of blood and it was all real sticky, proper created stage blood. There was no cheating. We never used red water food coloring. We didn't ever find shortcuts. It was the sticky stuff all the time. And the creators of the blood for the film actually had to go and rent out an industrial kitchen to cook this stuff up," he explains. "We needed so much of it. And blood ain't cheap, man. Blood is expensive, and I think by the end of the film we were probably starting to even recycle. So 6,500 liters was what we had, but because of some of the big events, we were able to actually drain that blood away and then reuse it again."

Evil Dead Rise is now available on Digital and 4K UHD.