Ah, it is pleasing to have Sam Raimi back in the house. For close to half a century the amiable Michigander has been amusing and appalling us with a brand of comic shocker that is all his own.
When The Evil Dead, his notorious reanimation horror, won cult success in 1981, more than a few hailed the arrival of a new John Carpenter. He shares some concerns with that macabre master. But Raimi is in at least as much debt to Buster Keaton, the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers. You can still see those influences in Send Help, his tip-top new romp.
“I started out just making comedies,” Raimi tells me. “And my buddy said, ‘If you want to break into the movies you’ve got learn to make a horror movie.’ So I made a horror movie. But I could never quite get away from my comedic past. It started to sneak into the horror films. It just became an okay thing for me to do.”
He is not the only horror master to have stumbled into the genre half by accident. Neither George A Romero, who emerged with Night of the Living Dead in 1968, nor Wes Craven, who shocked first with Last House on the Left in 1972, had any initial notion of making horror films. Raimi, Romero and Craven each had a can of film stock and a pocketful of small change. This was the way in.
READ MORE
“I could only speak of the United States movie market at the time, but they just weren’t showing independent films,” Raimi says. “The only independent films that could get out there would be so cheap they would show them at the drive-ins. And what the drive-ins showed were raunchy comedies or cheap horror films.”
He laughs at the oddness of it all.
“I watched a lot of horror films, and I didn’t really like them,” he says. “They scared me. But I started to admire how the directors constructed suspense sequences.”
At any rate, the plan worked. The Evil Dead became a cult hit on VHS. The Evil Dead 2 was a bigger smash still and, with its careering camera movements, became among the most influential horror films of the 1980s.
Raimi directed Liam Neeson in the top-notch Darkman. He tried a western with The Quick and the Dead. By turn of the millennium he was directing the first, enormously successful Spider-Man trilogy for Sony Pictures. Raimi later shot a Dr Strange film for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
[ Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: Marvel-by-numbersOpens in new window ]
That can’t have been what he expected when, as a kid, he and he pals were firing off film in the suburbs of Detroit.
“I didn’t. I had no idea,” he says. “I was just trying to make my next movie. And the next one after that, if possible. I was trying to make my investors’ money back that we had raised in Detroit. I was just very lucky that Stephen King gave the movie a good word in a review, and the film got noticed and I was off.”
Forty-five years after King called The Evil Dead “the most ferociously original horror film of the year” Raimi confirms, with Send Help, that he has lost none of his juice.
Rachel McAdams stars as Linda, a misused mid-level executive – constantly patronised by the corporate bros – who, following a spectacular private-plane crash, ends up stranded on a desert island with her ghastly young boss.
Played with sleek arrogance by Dylan O’Brien, the pampered chief executive soon realises that his underling has the gifts and the grit to keep them alive. It is she who emerges drenched in blood after spearing a savage wild hog to death.
Already a hit in the US after opening to strong reviews, the riotous flick, written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, is most notable for its dizzying swing between genres. It is a horror film. It is a workplace satire. It threatens to become a romantic comedy.
“A lot of it was in the script that Shannon and Swift wrote,” Raimi says. “It was really a script where you thought, ‘What comes next? I just don’t know.’ And it was mixed in its tone. And I do that in my movies too.”
The film is good on how women, whatever their gifts, can struggle to make themselves heard in the workplace. Linda is no saintly crusader. At times we are allowed to wonder if she might be the villain. It’s a delightfully choppy entertainment.
“We’d switch on the island and then switch back again,” he says. “It was kind of an experiment to have audience identification go from one character to the next and back to the first.”
There is a solid stylistic line between Send Help and the no-budget short films Raimi and his pals made in the late 1970s. He never went to film school. He had no industry mentors. He just got hold of a cheap camera and began shooting film.
The hectic camera swoops we see in the new film had their origins in decisions he made on the sidewalks and scrubland of Detroit. The aesthetic is similar too: a cheeky, carefree madness that allows any improbability. His films are still fun.
“Myself and my friends – Bruce Campbell and others – made a lot of Super 8 movies when we were in high school,” he says. “That’s all we would do every weekend. We’d get together and make them, and we learned the techniques of film cutting and photography and acting. We learned how to do special effects cheaply. I applied everything that we had learned together in those films.”
[ Bruce Campbell: Life after Evil DeadOpens in new window ]
Bruce Campbell, of course, is the lofty character actor who has remained by Raimi’s side ever since. He was the haunted star of the Evil Dead films. If you pay close attention you will catch brief sight of him in Send Help. There is a sense that, with the friends now in their 60s, their relationship has barely altered.
“I never went to film school, so it’s hard for me to compare, but the things that I learned I still do apply today,” Raimi says. “It’s all about planning – as it was back then. It really helps to go over the script a number of times and envision it in your head. You really ask questions in that stage and make decisions before you get to the set. That was ingrained upon me in the early days. And I still use that technique today.”
Here is a question. Is it now too easy for young people to make a film? Everyone has a movie camera in their pocket. Just to get moving images on to a screen was, for Raimi’s generation, a complicated and expensive business. Film stock burns money.
“It did have its advantages,” he says. “We would take our leaf-raking money or our snow-shovelling money – that’s how you made money in Michigan – and pool it to buy a cassette of film and pay for processing later. That made us very careful about what we were shooting.”
There were some bizarre controversies. In the early 1980s The Evil Dead was implicated in the absurd media panic around “video nasties”. Driven on by a culturally reactionary Conservative government, British campaigners became greatly heated about the supposed filth that was now playing in the nation’s livingrooms. Palace Pictures, the UK distributor of Evil Dead, had quite a fight on its hands.
“We were just trying to make the scariest gross-out movie – it was more of a comedy than anything else,” Raimi says, still aghast. “But they took it very seriously in Great Britain. I really appreciate Palace Pictures for supporting me and fighting for people’s freedom to see whatever it is they choose to see.”
Raimi could hardly seem less like a dangerous figure. Softly spoken, at home to a throaty cackle, he has the energy of a cheeky uncle. Come to think of it, he doesn’t come over like a director of studio blockbusters either. But that is what he now is.
There is always talk about what he might do next with the comic-book behemoths. Might he shoot a Batman film for DC? What about another Dr Strange flick for Marvel?
“I have no plans right now for anything,” he says with a shrug. “I just finished this one, and I’m looking forward to taking a little bit of a break.”
An ordinary, extraordinary guy.
Send Help is in cinemas now
