The Return of the Weird Blockbuster
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness raises the question: Is Sam Raimi the best director to ever be attached to a Marvel movie? He doesn’t have an Oscar like Chloé Zhao or Taika Waititi, the sorts of filmmakers who, if nothing else, win Oscars (their movies really make you think). He doesn’t typically do prestige, and he avoids serious subject matter. But Raimi is also a singularly kinetic visual storyteller—a true showman—and, in his way, a transformational figure in the recent history of American cinema.
When Raimi directed the first (and arguably best) Spider-Man in 2002, comic-book properties were a volatile prospect, if not an all-out gamble. The Joel Schumacher Batman movies were a pop-culture punch line, and R-rated Bayhem was all the rage. That Spider-Man surpassed even the most optimistic box-office expectations is only part of the story, however. The fact that a major studio would entrust such a valuable title to a guy like Raimi—whose most famous movie to that point featured a screaming woman swallowing an eyeball—connects to a larger narrative that has defined Hollywood since the 1990s. Like Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro, Raimi personifies the revenge of the nerds—the rise of weirdo geniuses who mutated their low-budget ingenuity to monolithic proportions. By now, the Raimi myth is familiar and endearing. Like Steven Spielberg, he spent his adolescence orchestrating Super-8 movies with his friends, including childhood pal (and future indispensable leading man) Bruce Campbell. Working with Campbell and his brother Ted Raimi—his other main wingman and eventual stalwart cowriter and cameo specialist—in 1977, he cranked out a $2,000 feature called It’s Murder!. The next year, Raimi recruited producer Rob Tapert and crafted a 31-minute short called Within the Woods that, over 40 years later, looks like the primal scene of his cinema. Inspired equally by Raimi’s love of B-movies and the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, Within the Woods features a set of unlucky characters venturing out to an isolated cabin and succumbing, one dismembered body part at a time, to accidentally awakened demonic forces. After convincing a sympathetic theater manager in Detroit to screen the film before a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Raimi pivoted to using Within the Woods as proof of concept for a feature entitled The Evil Dead.
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Despite costing exponentially more than its predecessor (a few hundred thousand dollars in all), The Evil Dead is as thrifty and threadbare as horror movies get. It wears its cheapness proudly. The joy of the film owes partially to its palpable homemade quality—the feeling that it was created guerilla-style by a group of friends—and the genuine inventiveness of Raimi’s direction, which attempts to mitigate the predictability of the plot and the shortcomings of the production budget by blasting right past (or through) them. If the tracking shots in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining are the cinematographic equivalent of a gold-medal ice-dancing program—graceful figure eights traced into infinity—Raimi’s aesthetic in The Evil Dead is like an obstacle course. In bravura scene after bravura scene, the director wields his makeshift “projectile cam” like a weapon against the characters, stalking, chasing, and even assaulting them. Meanwhile, the film’s wonderfully disgusting and gory effects are complemented by the authentic battle scars suffered by the cast and crew under adverse, unsupervised conditions. “If everyone was in extreme pain and misery, that would translate into horror,” Raimi said on a 2007 DVD commentary, striking a note of playful sadism at odds with his later transformation to a clockwork professional who wears a suit and tie at all times on set—a ready-made metaphor for a one-time hellraiser’s eventual taming.
A cult hit that eventually grossed almost eight times its budget despite being branded with an X rating by the MPAA—a scarlet letter that ultimately helped attract a hardcore horror-movie audience—The Evil Dead remains one of the most influential movies of the 1980s, a veritable how-to manual for aspiring backyard auteurs everywhere. It’s one thing to see a movie like The Shining or The Thing and marvel at the smooth, implacable craft; it’s another to watch something that seems like it could plausibly be replicated with a few thousand dollars and some buckets of corn syrup.
The movie had some high-end influence, as well: After serving as an apprentice editor on the project, Joel Coen was inspired by Raimi’s example to craft an extended trailer for a movie called Blood Simple with his brother Ethan in an attempt to secure private financing. With their shared background and love for older American cinema, it makes sense that Coen and Raimi would be friends, and their next collaboration stands as one of the 1980s’ true films maudit: the batshit (and underrated) horror-comedy Crimewave, a wild noir pastiche that nearly ended the group’s careers before they’d really gotten started. A madcap riff involving burglar alarms, exterminators, and a carload of nuns (one of whom was played by a very young Frances McDormand), Crimewave skirts incoherence to the point of feeling like an experimental film, albeit one produced on a studio budget; in what basically amounted to his industry debut, Raimi clashed with his producers (including the venerable veteran Norman Lear), seethed over his inability to cast The Evil Dead’s leading man, Campbell, in the lead, and at one point used dynamite to explode a frozen section of the Detroit River in order to shoot there—as good a metaphor as any for a combustible filmmaking experience. The film was taken away from Raimi in post-production and dumped into theaters without any support. As Campbell put it in his excellent autobiography, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, “It wasn’t released—it escaped!”
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