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.ĭespite 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.

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. Inspired equally by Raimi’s love of B-movies and the fiction of H.P. 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. 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!. Like Steven Spielberg, he spent his adolescence orchestrating Super-8 movies with his friends, including childhood pal (and future indispensable leading man) Bruce Campbell. 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.īy now, the Raimi myth is familiar and endearing. 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. That Spider-Man surpassed even the most optimistic box-office expectations is only part of the story, however. The Joel Schumacher Batman movies were a pop-culture punch line, and R-rated Bayhem was all the rage. 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. 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. He doesn’t typically do prestige, and he avoids serious subject matter.

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).

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