The films of Sam Raimi vary in terms of scale and genre, but there’s always a consistent element: tenacity. Ash Williams, Peter Parker, and the other protagonists in his films are able to roll with the chaos that surrounds them. Raimi is known for integrating this into his craft, as his lead actors are thrown into physical challenges for his elaborate set pieces. Similarly, Sam Raimi has rolled with the punches that come from an ever changing filmmaking climate with a charming gumption. From his humble beginnings in Detroit to massive blockbuster productions in Hollywood, Raimi has always fought to make entertaining films his way. Sometimes his vision is upheld, but other times he’s gotten swallowed by the big machine. His directorial journey not only gives us a fascinating portrait of a filmmaker, but presents a larger scale picture of how Hollywood has treated true genre visionaries like Raimi over the last four decades.
After making several short films in high school, Sam Raimi made his first feature film as a literal babe in the woods. Raimi — alongside collaborators like producer Rob Tapert & leading man Bruce Campbell — made The Evil Dead in the woodlands of Michigan with little supervision or experience in actual film production. Part of the charm of The Evil Dead is how much ingenuity is on display from these naive young creatives left to their own devices, with cracking makeup and cameras being attached to two-by-fours while gliding along The Michigan River. This type of low-budget filmmaking felt dangerous, as if the filmmakers had a similar unhinged madness to the Deadites depicted in the film. An audience could feel the pain of every slap to Bruce Campbell’s face or the sticky texture of every syrupy blood drop spewed from Theresa Tilly’s mouth. It’s a type of veracity rarely seen in horror films up to that point, which helped make The Evil Dead a cult phenomenon that even Stephen King himself called “The most ferociously original horror film of 1982.”
The Evil Dead’s cult success allowed Raimi to then jump into small scale studio filmmaking with Crimewave, a looney crime comedy. The naivete that made The Evil Dead a phenomenon caused one disaster after another on Crimewave. Raimi’s ill-advised budgeting wasn’t calculated correctly, resulting in dangerous shortcuts that the studio, Embassy Pictures, found unprofessional. Given the resulting incidents, like Raimi using actual dynamite to clear out ice in a frozen Detroit River, the studio’s concerns were understandable. While Crimewave showcases his ambition in set pieces like a series of doorways toppling like dominoes, the film clearly shows Raimi’s reach exceeds his grasp. There’s no danger in the convoluted crime story or the cartoonish set pieces that help to build up tension in Raimi’s elaborate antics. Instead, we’re left with disconnected beats that feel futile, which is emblematic of how lost the cast and camera work feels amongst this jumbled mess of a production. In his memoir If Chins Could Kill, Bruce Campbell — who served as a producer and supporting actor on the film — later claimed that the various production problems with Crimewave would normally “lead to the end of a director’s career.”
Luckily, this served as a sophomore slump turned learning experience for Sam Raimi as a director, rather than an abrupt conclusion. With his next film, Evil Dead 2, Raimi created another bizarre horror comedy adventure with more visual ambition supported by a $3.5 million budget. Raimi still kept his chaotic energy alive while crafting a far more comedic take on Bruce Campbell’s Ash fighting Deadites in a cabin. 1981-era Raimi couldn’t give us adventurous wild images like Ash’s possessed hand smashing dinner plates on his face or the possessed corpse of Henrietta transforming into a snake-like demon that’s chopped into bits. Each set piece continues to build that danger from the first film, but in a way that intensifies a comedic madness at the same time. Comedy and horror both rely on “gags” to either horrify us or make us laugh, a sentiment Sam Raimi interchanges in Evil Dead 2 with effortless energy. This resulted in a film that’s still praised as a masterpiece of horror comedy that caught Hollywood’s eye.
Sam Raimi came to Hollywood as it was dying to repeat the massive success of Tim Burton’s Batman adaptation. Initially, Raimi wanted to adapt one of his favorite pulp figures known as The Shadow. However, after he failed to get the rights, Raimi took his ideas and created a new superhero: Darkman. The titular character has clear parallels between both The Shadow and Batman. Dr. Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson) becomes Darkman after mobsters blow up his lab and leave him for dead, forcing him to use his synthetic skin technology to hide his disfigured face and seek his vengeance. Using this template, Raimi crafted a silly yet sincere comic book action film, adding a Universal Monster angle of tragedy to its hero that allowed for horror-tinged aesthetics over massive action set pieces. While on a far larger scale than his previous efforts, moments like Darkman hanging off a helicopter hook still maintain Raimi’s love of rubber band physics and cartoonish moments of peril. At this time, the skill of a director of his caliber was an asset to a studio wanting to ride the wave of Batman. Studios still valued a singular artistic voice of madness like Raimi’s.
Darkman ended up leading to a wild decade of experimentation for Sam Raimi’s career. The director’s next five films saw him expand his horizons. Army of Darkness and The Quick & the Dead allowed him to apply his warped genre sensibilities to medieval fantasy and the old west. By contrast, A Simple Plan, For the Love of the Game and The Gift proved Raimi could strip himself of his genre trappings and make a twisty crime thriller, a sincere sports drama, and a supernatural mystery respectively. During this time, Raimi used his clout to break into producorial efforts on films like Timecop and TV shows like Xena: Warrior Princess. While all of these projects have a few of Raimi’s familiar flourishes, there’s far more emphasis on character work and dramatic tension rather than elaborate thrills as the decade goes on. Going from a camera zooming through a hole in a gunfighter’s head in The Quick and the Dead to the quiet stand off at the climax of A Simple Plan is a true statement of purpose for Raimi during this period. His later projects have camera setups that are more professional and only tilt into Evil Dead elements when absolutely necessary to convey thematic weight. All of this proved to studios that he wasn’t just an extreme horror director. While these films weren’t massive box office successes, Sam Raimi showed he could deal with a variety of genres, take on multiple responsibilities, & juggle the egos of big stars. He had graduated to a much larger scale.
Of course, that larger scale led to Spider-Man. After decades of false starts adapting the iconic Marvel Comics character for the big screen, Sam took the reins. Preceding Marvel superhero films like Blade and X-Men proved the genre could still be viable after a string of failures in the 1990s, but Raimi’s take elevated what comic book films could be with his first two Spider-Man outings. Raimi’s love for the character, visual style, and grasp of burgeoning CG technology allowed for a version of the web-slinging superhero that felt like it leaped off the page. Peter Parker and the villains he faced, like Green Goblin and Doc Ock, actually had solid emotional motivations that gave the weight to their larger-than-life actions, as was the MO for Marvel’s heroes in general. While goofy elements are a hallmark of his adventures, Parker’s responsibility to the people at large outweighs his desires for a personal life in order to keep his loved ones out of danger. Those broad emotional stakes give way to more visceral action sequences than most prior comic book films were capable of. Scenes like the bloody climactic fight of the first Spider-Man or the Doc Ock surgery scene in Spider-Man 2 are a callback to the danger of his Evil Dead days. Both films embrace a certain corny sincerity that evokes the 1960s era comics, but with thrilling modern action set pieces that see Raimi’s kinetic style blown up to a new scale. Plus, aside from a few bits of product placement and dated current soundtrack choices, Raimi’s first two Spider-Man films feel cohesively their own without too much studio meddling.
This would be a very different story with 2007’s Spider-Man 3, though. Sam Raimi’s plans for a Sandman/Vulture team up clashed with producer Avi Arad and Sony’s desires to implement the popular 1990s era villain Venom. Raimi’s disinterest in the character combined with the various plot threads lingering from the first two films resulted in a very muddled third entry. Spider-Man 3 has flashes of Raimi’s visual flair and heartfelt sincerity, but they’re weighed down by messier character arcs and repetitive structural elements from the previous films. Elaborate fight scenes with the Sandman that push the boundaries of what CG could capture are often followed up by clunky revelations like Harry Osbourne’s amnesia. Spider-Man 3 feels like an early warning sign for crowded blockbusters to come rather than a satisfactory finale to his trilogy, paving the way for the quantity over quality standard that became even more prevalent in the blockbusters of the next decade and a half. Unlike Crimewave, where Raimi’s own vision couldn’t be accomplished due to his own lack of experience, Spider-Man 3 shows modern blockbuster culture’s desire to overcrowd an installment and thus dilute Raimi’s attempts to advance his story. The disappointing experience on his third Spider-Man outing made Raimi drop out of making a fourth, leading to Sony rebooting the franchise.
After five years of web-slinging cinema, Sam Raimi made two films that truly signified how blockbuster culture had shifted. In 2009, he went back to his roots with the mid-budget demonic curse-based horror film Drag Me To Hell. While full of his trademark gags and thrills from The Evil Dead days, the film was released in the summer, where it was lost between major blockbuster reboots like Star Trek and Terminator Salvation. Audiences didn’t respond well to his familiar tricks, and so Raimi pivoted to a larger-scale franchise attempt with Disney’s Oz The Great and Powerful. He sought to pay homage to the 1939 classic film (as much as Disney legally could) while also setting the stage for a new Oz franchise. While making about $500 million worldwide, the film ultimately disappointed in the eyes of a studio hoping to replicate the massive over $1 billion returns of the burgeoning Marvel Cinematic Universe and Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland. Both of these films showed that Raimi’s directorial eye no longer had a place in a film landscape where IP is the biggest draw. It’s a sad bit of tragic irony, given how Raimi’s work on Spider-Man helped get the ball rolling.
Thus, Sam Raimi largely retreated from the director’s chair for about a decade. He continued producing films through his company Ghosthouse Pictures, and occasionally directed episodes of television, like the pilot for Ash vs Evil Dead. Raimi would be in talks for major film projects, but nothing concrete was confirmed until he was announced for the upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe production Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Of all the projects to bring Raimi back to the big screen, a new Marvel production seemed least likely. Given the tight reins producer Kevin Feige has on all MCU productions so as to keep them of apiece, the second Doctor Strange film wouldn’t leave much room for Raimi to flourish in theory. Even the MCU/Sony Spider-Man films resemble more of the factory style filmmaking of other productions in that continuity than the Raimi films. Any scenes where Raimi’s Spider-Man cast reprise their roles in Jon Watts’ Spider-Man No Way Home feel soulless and dull by comparison.
This next step in his career could lead in two different directions: either Sam Raimi is caving to the pressure of anonymous homogeneity or he’s made a deal to have more creative control over Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, given his clout within the superhero genre. Both could be possible, especially given he has nothing to prove either way. Raimi climbed from the woods of Michigan into a studio system where he learned from his mistakes and refined them. The type of career that Raimi has isn’t one that really exists anymore. Anyone who would make a successful smaller-tier horror film like The Evil Dead would now be immediately scooped into the MCU machine on their second shot. So, whether he’s just cashing in on a paycheck or trying to bring his style to a new generation of cinemagoers, his play in cinema history is still as firmly in place as an early 1980s camera attached to a two-by-four.
