With just nine words-“The most ferociously original horror film of the year”-author Stephen King rescued a cheap little horror flick called “The Evil Dead” from obscurity in 1982 and helped launch writer-director Sam Raimi’s career.
“King really pulled us out of the muck,” says Raimi, who met King at the Cannes film festival that year, where he took his low-budget flick in search of a distributor. “I owe a lot to him. I was so enamored of his work when I met him, I found it incredible that he even spoke to me.”
Raimi had spent three years trying to find someone to distribute his film in the United States. “Everybody said no.” Then, he says, King’s praise came out, and bingo! New Line Cinema came calling.
Eleven years later comes “Army of Darkness,” the third chapter in Raimi’s “Evil Dead” series. While never hugely profitable, the series has developed a cult following for its copious gore, hyperkinetic camerawork and anything-can-happen atmosphere.
But if King were to review “Army of Darkness,” he’d have to change his original line to read: “The most ferociously original comedy of the year.”
“It was a cool thing for me when I was 20 to do the gore,” Raimi says, “but now I’m 33, and I’m more interested in making people laugh. I’ve gone soft on you-what can I say?”
Raimi was a student of literature and history at Michigan State University in 1979 when he decided to drop out and make a feature film. That movie was “The Evil Dead,” made for $375,000 by Raimi and buddies Bruce Campbell (who played the lead role of Ash) and Robert Tapert (who produced the film).
“I had made about 36 Super-8 films,” Raimi says. “Maybe it was our ignorance that enabled us to do it. We didn’t know how hard it would turn out to be.”
To raise money, Raimi and his partners took odd jobs and knocked on the doors of potential investors, toting a makeshift 15-minute Super-8 version of their movie-an H.P. Lovecraft-flavored tale of five cabin-bound teenagers who discover a mysterious book containing passages that awaken long-dormant, vicious demons.
The finished product was a no-holds-barred splatter fest that set a new mark for gore in horror films. Ragged and amateurishly acted, “The Evil Dead” nevertheless wowed horror fans. Raimi was willing to try anything-eyeballs flying into mouths, decapitation by shovel, attacks by killer trees.
Naturally, there was a sequel. “Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn,” essentially a rehash of the original, was financed and released in 1987 by producer Dino De Laurentis’ then-fledging (and now defunct) company, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. Campbell reprised the role of Ash, and Tapert again produced. This time, the camera movement was more frantic, the gore a tad more restrained and the bloody slapstick humor more pronounced (one long sequence depicts Ash’s comedic battle with his possessed right hand).
Then came Raimi’s shot at the big time, directing the 1990 action-adventure thriller “Darkman.” It was Raimi’s first opportunity to work with “real” actors (Liam Neeson and Frances McDormand) and a real studio (Universal).
The result was Raimi’s most stylish film, full of audacious, showstopping visuals (one shot entered a character’s eye, bounced around inside his mind and exited through the other eye).
“Darkman” grossed a respectable $50 million worldwide, much to Raimi’s relief.
“I’d hoped that it would make money for the studio, not so that I could profit, but so I could make another picture,” he says. “And fortunately, it did. So I decided to make a movie that wouldn’t make money again! `Evil Dead 3′! Figure that one out.”
“Army of Darkness” marks a series of firsts in the “Dead” series. For once, Raimi had a real budget-$12 million, financed once again by De Laurentiis-and distribution from a major studio (Universal). It’s also the first in the series to earn an “R” rating (the previous two were released unrated). Though still violent, the film is relatively bloodless.
Instead, Raimi has poured on the laughs. “Army” is an outright comedy: Call it “The Three Stooges Go to Hell.”
“We tried to put a little bit of black humor in the first one, just a little, so the audience would be mainly scared and do a little bit of laughing,” Raimi says. “In the second one we leaned much more heavily on the humor. And in the third one, we just said, `What the hell!’ “
In “Army,” Ash is stuck in the 13th Century, trying to find his way back to the present while once again duking it out with the perseverant demons.
Campbell, whose histrionic acting style often prompted unintended laughter in the first two films, is back in the lead role.
“He’s such a good friend of mine, I always wanted to stick with him,” Raimi says. “Ash is the Bugs Bunny of horror film. You can stretch him like taffy, you can bang him against the wall-actually, he’s more like Daffy Duck. Daffy is the loudmouth, always getting himself into trouble, and that’s the character Bruce plays well.”
Actress Bridget Fonda (“Single White Female”) has a cameo in the film. “She said, `Sam, I know this sounds weird, but I’m a big fan of your “Evil Dead” movies.’ You see, everyone has their own dirty secrets. She took this bit part and worked for nothing, just as a favor.”
Raimi is now shooting second-unit photography on “The Hudsucker Proxy,” the new film by Joel and Ethan Coen (“Barton Fink”), which Raimi co-wrote. He’s also talking to Fox Television about “Mantis,” a two-hour pilot for a series about a chemist with superpowers.
And while he claims indifference toward “Army’s” box office receipts, he does hope the audience will come away pleased.
“My girlfriend and I are living in a void,” he says, laughing nervously. “We have no idea if people are gonna hate it or like it. We just don’t know.”
