Sam Raimi’s Singular, Sensational Career Has Careened From Cult Classics To Big Budget Blockbusters

Nine minutes into Evil Dead II, Ash (Bruce Campbell) wakes up in a mud puddle and starts a slow, 360 degree pan of his surroundings. The camera takes on his point-of-view, and the gag I’m anticipating is that something terrible will jump into the clearing from between the trees. The punchline of the scene, in which the camera pans all the way around back to find Ash looking the other way, was a lot more clever than the fifteen-year-old me was expecting. At that moment, I became a full-throated acolyte of the church of Sam Raimi and, eventually, of his buddies who all had something to do with this film: Scott Spiegel who helped write it and his own insane late-eighties horror flick Intruder; legendary f/x mastermind Greg Nicotero; DP Peter Deming who would go on to work with David Lynch a lot, the Hughes brothers on From Hell, Wes Craven’s masterpiece Scream 2 before being reunited with Raimi for Oz the Great and Powerful.

When I caught up with The Evil Dead that same year in that same VHS format, I found much of the same visual inventiveness deployed for a project that felt a lot more like a horror movie than the guignol of its first sequel. Had I seen it first, though, I would’ve been similarly overcome by its electric charge. Here was this guy working on an obvious shoestring budget, making a movie teeming with wisdom about how movies move and think and then subverting all those expectations with the insolence of Rip Taylor, showering the unprepared with handfuls of confetti to a chorus of slide whistles and kazoos.

Raimi has cited the Three Stooges as primary and heavy influence on his work and, true to form, he has stunt people in his credits dubbed “Fake Shemp” in honor of the body double used to stand in for Stooge Shemp Howard after his sudden death in 1955. Already the unpopular occasional replacement for iconic Curly, being a “Fake Shemp” suggests an imminently “Raimi” layered absurdity and self-effacement: what possible thanks, after all, could there be for a person forced to stand in for someone most people don’t want in the first place? The influence of the Stooges is clear throughout Raimi’s work in multiples ways: the manic pacing, the sadomasochistic lengths its performers go in order to entertain; the acerbic, cartoonish sarcasm; the extent to which the camera is unmoored and becomes an active participant in the hijinks before it. My wife and I named the first dog we got together when we were first married “Raimi.” Whatever the Stooges were for him, Sam Raimi was a little bit of that for me.

The first Evil Dead film, shot for a pittance in a haunted backwood Tennessee cabin that burned to the ground once shooting was done, wasn’t getting a lot of interest from American distributors so producer Irvin Shapiro hoping there might be a foreign market for it, got it screened at Cannes in 1982. After Stephen King called it “the most ferociously original horror film of the year” (and was later rumored to have pressured Dino De Laurentis into greenlighting the sequel), it found a firm foothold as a beloved cult classic and one of those video store covers that Gen Xers like me still remember looking at with fascination and horror. 

The Evil Dead is “meta” without being smug about it. There are no camera set-ups in The Evil Dead that feel predictable; no horror cliche left untouched and untransformed into a misdirection or so magnified that it transcends cliche; no reaction by a legendarily-game Bruce Campbell that ever feels less than completely committed. I think that’s what drives these early Sam Raimi joints for me: not the obvious genius of their technical and theoretical invention so much as the earnestness of the love for the act of creation that’s obvious in every frame. Serving as assistant editor to Edna Ruth Paul is Joel Coen, by the way, the brothers and Raimi (along with eventually Holly Hunter, Frances McDormand and Kathy Bates), striking up a fast friendship when Raimi went to live with the Coens in Hollywood after working on this picture together. Their affinity for one another off-screen led to Crimewave, written by the Coens and directed by Raimi, it’s a bowdlerized curiosity of a slapstick caper comedy that retains hints of what all three would become in retrospect. It’s visually inventive, restless, and smart, and its script carries with it the sense of the wordy absurd that the Coens would parlay into their own films. The three would work together again when the Coens gave the Darkman script a polish and, later, when Raimi pitched in on the writing of the Coens’ The Hudsucker Proxy.

Evil Dead II is more remake than sequel: a bigger, brighter, funnier version of the first film that marks a progression in this trilogy from semi-serious horror to mostly-farce. Depending on the day, Evil Dead II is in my top ten favorite movies of all time. It’s the energy of it, the way it feels sprightly without somehow also being annoying or, worse, cloying. Ash is a giant cheeseball, hoping for a romantic weekend with his ballerina girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler) that almost immediately goes awry after a sequence of events that culminates in him having to decapitate her with a shovel.

Why he then buries her body, tearfully, in the woods is more difficult to explain but you go with it. Turns out, by playing a reel-to-reel recording of someone reading an ancient “Book of the Dead,” the Evil Dead have risen to eat the souls of the living. Consider the sequence with reanimated taxidermy that ends in what’s essentially a dance sequence featuring Ash, laugh-crying, in the middle of it; or another where he chainsaws off his own possessed hand and traps it under a bucket and a pile of books that includes A Farewell to Arms (get it?).

The third film in the trilogy, Army of Darkness, wormholes Ash back in time. It was the first of the Evil Dead films I saw in the theater, and though I was initially disappointed with how it veers away from horror, I was sold as soon as I realized how hard it was trying to be one of those live-action Disney programmers in the ’80s when the House of Mouse was actually in trouble. Army of Darkness is a silly, auto-critiquing take on stuff like Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Unidentified Flying Oddball that carries with it my favorite line in any Raimi flick when Ash, in response to a gift given to him as a peace offering, says “thanks, I needed a horse blanket.”

The first Raimi film I saw in a theater, though, was Darkman, his thrilling, punching way above its weight class superhero movie made at a time when his attempts to do Spider-Man were seen as ridiculous. Who wants a live-action comic book movie, amiright? Darkman features a thrilling villain in Robert G. Durant played by an actor who, at that time, was best known as the lovable, learning-disabled Benny on television’s L.A. Law. Liam Neeson plays a brilliant scientist working on a liquid skin project that eventually allows him to take on the appearance of anyone he chooses — but only for a very short while. An operatic, tragic romance with his girl Julie (Frances McDormand) ends in the kind of trademark Raimi pyrotechnics of the kind that I felt, still feel, a kind of possessive ownership over like that little band you’ve loved forever suddenly starting to sell out arenas. Darkman is incredible. So is his western The Quick and the Dead that has been overshadowed by stories of how Gene Hackman was a real bear to work with (as is his practice) and of Sharon Stone’s brilliant insistence in the casting of Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio. The filmmaking is liquid, extraordinary, a specific money shot set up with a silhouette and then an angle through the fist-sized hole blown in somebody’s head. That’s Raimi, his signature is all over this and its dismissal at the time as at once too goony and too conventional does it an extraordinary disservice. 

Raimi began to get his due, though, with his follow-up film, an adaptation of Scott B. Smith’s superlative thriller A Simple Plan. Starring Billy Bob Thornton, Bill Paxton (who was originally cast as Darkman), and Bridget Fonda (Army of Darkness’ girlfriend Linda), it’s a “small” film and, for Raimi, a sedate and more traditionally accessible fable about greed, loyalty, and the toll that money takes on individual morality. Jacob (Thornton), the odd brother who’s failed to launch compared to his popular, handsome brother Hank (Paxton) and his pretty wife Sarah (Fonda), gets a speech at one point about how his life has amounted to not very much and he knows that. It’s as good and for as many of the same reasons as Brando’s “contender” speech from On the Waterfront. The movie is a stunner. Raimi parlayed his new mainstream respectability into a shrine to his beloved baseball, the Kevin Costner-starring For Love of the Game that, for as surprisingly solid as it is, really only has one truly Raimi moment in a quick baseball POV shot. It’s the first Raimi film that could have been directed by someone else, so he followed it up with the perverse, sideshow-feeling supernatural thriller The Gift, written by Billy Bob Thornton and sporting a cast including Cate Blanchett, Katie Holmes, and Keanu Reeves as a vile hick. 

The big Raimi in the popular conversation, though, comes next in his three, long-gestating Spider-Man movies that remain, for many, myself included, the gold standard for this kind of pop comic book adaptation. His hallmarks are all over these pictures, from the body horror of Peter Parker’s (Tobey Maguire) organic web shooters to the way he employs them in a brilliant moment into a commentary about a young man, growing new hairs and spurting new fluids, keeping his Aunt May on the other side of the door as he does some hasty cleaning up. Spider-Man 2, with its Doctor Octavious (Alfred Molina) “birth” sequence in an emergency room, is essentially an outtake from Evil Dead II. Even the maligned third installment is fascinating what with its villains made of oil and sand in an era of our history in which the popular iconography of colonialism and capitalism have become inexorably intertwined in this perverse tango into the apocalypse. A dream come true for Raimi, the films also exposed him to the full toxicity of comic book fandom with every one of his decisions put under the microscope where they were inevitably found wanting. It’s only in retrospect that these pictures, and especially Spider-Man 2, have been seen as true rarities in terms of their kaleidoscopic color palette, the muscularity and intelligence of their action sequences, and the obvious joy of their execution.

Raimi went back to horror with the underestimated Drag Me to Hell: a bleak, nihilistic exercise in folk curses and the impersonal cruelties of the banking industry that guys like me celebrated as a return to the fold. If the public didn’t get him, we got him. His next picture, Oz the Great and Powerful, though, shook a lot of faith. I watched it twice in the theater, looking for Raimi and what I found was a director mismatched not with material (the literary Oz is extraordinarily weird) but perhaps hamstrung by budget and the new expectations placed upon him by a stint through the blockbuster machine. The more money involved, the more cooks in the kitchen, and Raimi had never been something that was easy to explain. He’s like Tom Waits or Neil Young. I can appreciate if you don’t get it, but I can’t explain it to you if you don’t.

That’s why, I guess, I’m a little nervous about his looming Doctor Strange 2, a movie made for a machine that brooks precious little individuality and even less innovation in the production of the world’s most expensive serial soap. If someone can break through the notes and expectations of a multi-billion dollar engine, it’s Sam Raimi, but I have some doubts as to whether anyone is stronger than that kind of money and power. It’s worth a shot. And if it buys him the ability to make the Evil Dead movie set in the far future, on a relative shoestring, with Bruce Campbell, then it’ll all have been worth it.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for pre-order. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.