Last month, something unusual happened on the Billboard video-sales charts. First and second place were taken, predictably enough, by the insuperable “Titanic,” and Disney’s audiovisual pacifier “Lady and the Tramp.” But close behind them, climbing as high as third place one week, to outrank even video-store sure things like “Austin Powers” and “Playboy’s Freshman Class,” was a movie called “The Evil Dead”—a cheese-and-ketchup horror flick from 1979 with an absurd plot, bad acting, and all the production values a mere three hundred and fifty thousand dollars can buy (not many).
Though less well known than other splatter movies of the same era, “The Evil Dead,” which is about a group of college students trapped in a cabin who are turned one by one into zombies by an unseen monster, is a genre cult classic. When I bought a copy at my local video store and asked the dyed-and-pierced youth behind the counter whether it was good, he gave me a withering look and replied, “It’s the best movie ever made.” The energetic sales of “The Evil Dead” and its sequel, “Evil Dead II—Dead by Dawn,” which was re-released last summer, coincide with a horror renaissance. Wes Craven’s 1996 movie “Scream” and last year’s “Scream 2” both grossed more than a hundred million dollars, and this summer’s “Halloween: H20,” in which Jamie Lee Curtis reprised her role from 1978’s “Halloween,” was a critical and commercial success.
“The Evil Dead” movies appeal not only to teens who like to scare themselves witless; they are also celebrated by a certain kind of cineaste. Film buffs note the wildly unconventional camera moves, racing along almost at ground level to convey the viewpoint of an onrushing monster. (Fellini is said to have been an admirer of “The Evil Dead.”) Comedy fans praise the two “Evil Dead” sequels (the third is called “Army of Darkness”) for their raw slapstick humor: in “Evil Dead II,” the star, Bruce Campbell, chainsaws off his own hand because it has been colonized by an evil spirit, then straps the saw to his stump to become a kind of avenging proto-cyborg. (Jay Douglas, of Anchor Bay Entertainment, which has re-released the videos, compares Campbell to Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin.) Moreover, connoisseurs of schlock find in the “Evil Dead” movies the kind of ham acting, crude special effects, and car-toonish poor taste that distinguish this American genre. The contemporary analogues of “The Evil Dead” are not just today’s horror films but gross-outs like “South Park” and cheesy, so-bad-they’re-good reruns on “Nick at Nite.”
Sam Raimi, who directed “The Evil Dead” when he was just twenty years old, is a master of cheese, which might be defined as an offness of taste and mood, akin to camp but without camp’s knowing distance. Since making the “Evil Dead” series, Raimi has gone on to direct several studio movies with grown-up budgets. In 1990, he made “Darkman,” a comic-book superhero melodrama starring Liam Neeson, which spawned two straight-to-video sequels that Raimi produced but didn’t direct. (The straight-to-video sequel is categorically cheesy.) In 1995, he made a Western, “The Quick and the Dead,” which was half homage, half spoof, and was noteworthy for being the first major motion picture in which Leonardo DiCaprio died tragically and Sharon Stone kept her clothes on. Then Raimi helped create the goofy Ancient Greece—meets—Santa Monica television series “Hercules” and its crypto-Sapphic spinoff, “Xena: Warrior Princess,” which for three seasons has been the most successful first-run syndicated drama on television, considerably enriching Raimi and his partner, Rob Tapert.
For almost two decades; Raimi has fulfilled a cultural role comparable to the bit part he played in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1994 movie “The Hudsucker Proxy,” where he was an adman trying to come up with a name for a new toy (the Hoopsucker? the Hudswinger?) that is eventually called the hula hoop. Raimi has dedicated his imaginative powers to the invention of simple, diverting pleasures, and has done so with engaged enthusiasm, rather than with the cool, aloof stylishness of his friends, the Coen brothers. The Coens, who have known Raimi since Joel was an assistant editor on “The Evil Dead,” are teasingly fond of him. In their office they have a framed still of him getting blown away in his role as the “snickering gunman” in “Miller’s Crossing,” and when they talk about him they sound the way Beavis and Butt-head would if they had doctorates in cinema studies and watched the Independent Film Channel instead of MTV.
I Met Sam Raimi for lunch recently to talk about his new movie, a thriller called ‘A Simple Plan,” which opens next month. Lunch was at midnight, and we ate in a church, but the site and the hour were not due to the nocturnal demands of horror. Raimi had been shooting night scenes in the bar of the Waldorf-Astoria as part of “For Love of the Game,” a project that sounds entirely wholesome, starring Kevin Costner as a baseball hero.
Raimi seemed wholesome, too, with the combined mischievousness and earnestness of a twelve-year-old. He had a courtly, understated manner, addressing his bit-part actors respectfully as “sir,” and thanking extras for their work. (“Sam’s very polite,” Joel Coen told me. “He has always helped little old ladies across the street. That has always been a part of Sam, along with the evisceration and dismemberment.”) You would call him baby-faced if it were possible for a baby to have a day’s growth of gray-flecked stubble. He wore a sports coat, as he usually does on set, as a sign of respect for his team; but he wore it over a rumpled pair of blue chinos and a pair of scuffed, clompy brown leather shoes.
In conversation, Raimi had a habit of smoothing his hair down on his forehead into choppy bangs, and he was attentive, and given to an occasional half-giggle when something amused him. Friends say he used to perform a party trick in which he would open a beer bottle with his eye socket. Scott Smith, the author and screenwriter of “A Simple Plan,” described some more recent practical jokery: “Sam would introduce me to a producer from Paramount by saying, ‘This is Scott Smith’s assistant,’ to see if this person would treat me differently, not knowing who I was,” Smith says. “He’s like the kid in school who wouldn’t get into trouble himself but would get you into trouble.”
“A Simple Plan” is the story of two brothers who find millions of dollars inside the wreckage of a crashed airplane and scheme to keep the money, a decision that leads inexorably to brutality, betrayal, and death. The film marks Raimi’s return to the movie business after a few years out. The hiatus was due, in part, to Raimi’s decision to spend more time with his two small children—Lorne, a boy of four and a half, and Henry, who is almost two. (Raimi’s wife, Gillian, the daughter of the television cowboy Lorne Greene, is expecting the couple’s first girl in January.) “I stopped shooting pictures, and I started getting into television, where you can drive to work every day and be back for dinner,” Raimi explained. His chief project was producing a horror series for CBS Television, called “American Gothic,” about a small South Carolina town where the sheriff is actually the Devil; it died during, its first season.
But Raimi’s absence from the movie industry was also a function of his reputation as a genre director: he had a hard time being seen as anything else. There was a moment in the late eighties when studio executives apparently regarded Sam Raimi as the next Tim Burton, but it failed to pan out. (Raimi was at one time attached to “Jack Frost,” a movie opening this Christmas about a child whose dead father comes back as Frosty the Snowman, but another director ended up making the film.) Even “A Simple Plan” is Raimi’s by default. The novel was optioned by Mike Nichols, bounced to Ben Stiller, and finally landed with Scott Rudin, whom Raimi petitioned for the position of director. “Scott Rudin told me, ‘You know, I want to work with you, but truthfully, there are a lot of other directors that I think are more right for this project, and you are, like, number fifteen down on the list,” Raimi said. Finally, when John Boorman had to abandon the project after casting the two leads and scouting locations, Raimi was brought in.
Though Raimi has always had devotees, his movies have never been quite good enough. His longtime partner Rob Tapert says, “I think ‘A Simple Plan’ is the first time Sam has shown his potential. I have always felt that he is a better director and filmmaker than the reception that the movies have received would suggest.”
“A Simple Plan” is Raimi’s first effort to make an altogether mainstream movie, albeit it an offbeat one. The influence of the Coens’ “Fargo” flavors the film: like it, “A Simple Plan” is set in a snowy Midwestern town where unexpected violence lurks. But the film is less ironic than “Fargo,” more heartfelt. To an eye accustomed to Raimi’s signature cartoon violence and over-sized characters, “A Simple Plan” is the picture of restraint. Bruce Campbell says, “You watch ‘A Simple Plan’ the way you watch a normal movie. Sam has a certain visual style, where the camera is always racing around and twisting up and down. But here he just shot it. He made that leap to storytelling, instead of ‘Sam Raimi, star of the movie.’ “
Raimi says that he was intent on making a character-driven drama this time. “I appreciate the artistry of the horror film,” he told me, “but the movies I see are not those. They are stories of real people, or a mix of real people and adventure, like ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,’ which I love.” “A Simple Plan” contains the first fully rounded characters that Raimi has ever had to deal with, particularly in Billy Bob Thornton’s portrayal of the older of the two brothers, who is a bit simpleminded, yet psychologically complex. Still, there are moments in which Raimi’s horror expertise is evident, as in a scene where the younger brother, played by Bill Paxton, first climbs into the cockpit of the crashed plane. For all Raimi’s talk about the power of character, he knows exactly what to do with a pilot’s decomposing corpse, a trapped, thrashing black crow, a lot of dark, cold metal, and a camera to leave his audience aghast with anxiety.
Raimi’s defining memory of the power of film is watching his father’s home movies. “I remember seeing footage of my seventh-birthday party,” he says. “It was a Halloween party, and he showed all the kids playing party games outside, and then he showed them leaving the party, and then, on the same reel, he showed them arriving at the party. I was so taken with the fact that he had shuffled the order of reality. I thought, This is unbelievable. Something about it made me giddy. It seemed like we were tampering with God’s world, altering something that was far beyond our ken. That was what I was attracted to. I wasn’t attracted to ‘the movies.’ I’ve often read about these filmmakers who were attracted to great movies, and that had nothing to do with it for me.”
Raimi was the fourth of five children, and he grew up in Franklin, Michigan, where his mother had a retail intimate-apparel business, Lulu’s Lingerie, and his father ran the furniture and appliance store that Raimi’s grandfather had established. (The name Raimi is abbreviated from the German Reingewertz.) “Our house was littered with comic books, Three Stooges paraphernalia, and Fig Newton bars—that was our reality,” says Ivan Raimi, Sam’s older brother, who is now an emergency-room doctor and a sometime collaborator on Raimi screenplays. Another brother, Ted, is a star of “Xena.”
An early influence was the eldest Raimi brother, Sander, who was six years Sam’s senior. “He used to perform magic at my parties when I was younger,” Raimi told me. “Incredible magic, with electricity and chemicals and fire.” By all accounts, Sander was the brilliant boy in the family. At the age of fifteen, he was selected to go on a scholarship trip to Israel. There he drowned in a swimming-pool accident.
“My parents pulled their strength together to make sure we survived it,” Raimi said. “But it colors everything you do for the rest of your life.” After Sander’s death, Sam learned how to do the tricks himself (He recently brushed up on his skills to perform at his son’s preschool.)
Raimi’s first movies were made on a Super-8 camera his father gave him when he was thirteen years old. He collaborated with a crowd of neighborhood boys, including Bruce Campbell, whom he had met in junior high school. “I remember seeing Sam dressed as Sherlock Holmes and sitting on the floor at school playing with little dolls, and I knew immediately the guy was different,” Campbell says. Other members of the team were John Cameron, who has gone on to produce for the Coen brothers, and Scott Spiegel, now a screenwriter and director in Los Angeles.
“We would meet every Saturday and Sunday, and make Civil War movies,” Raimi said. “We made The Civil War,’ Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Me and those boys made ‘The Jimmy Hoffa Story,’ Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. We read in the paper about him being kidnapped, and the next Sunday we went to the place where it happened and shot it. We made ‘James Bombed,’ starring Bruce Campbell. We made ‘Six Months to Live,’ the story of a guy who finds out he’s got an incurable disease and decides he is going to spend as much money as possible, and then, of course, he learns that he is not going to die, and he has to kill himself
“Up until eighth grade, we would play the women’s roles in drag. Our backward social skills prevented us from knowing women, but finally we overcame that. We’d say to girls, ‘O.K., come and be in “Pies and Guys” next Sunday—you’re the baker.’ Or we’d say, ‘Bruce Campbell comes home and he catches you with the six-months-to-live guy in the sequel we’re making, called “Six More Months.” “
After high school, Raimi went to Michigan State, where he and his roommate, Rob Tapert, made movies to show on campus. “The Happy Valley Kid,” a Super-8 movie that cost seven hundred dollars and grossed thirty-five hundred dollars, was the story of an M.S.U. student who goes on a rampage the week before finals. “It was a big hit on campus, because the kids really liked watching the professors get blown away,” Raimi said. “I learned, ‘Oh, it is the exploitation aspect that sells.”
After a year and a half of college, Raimi dropped out, as did Tapert, and they started to work with Bruce Campbell on “The Evil Dead,” raising money by working as busboys and cabdrivers and janitors. (The working title was “The Book of the Dead,” but a foreign-sales agent vetoed it. “He said, ‘Book? That won’t sell anything,” Raimi said.) They chose horror because, Raimi said, it could appeal to the drive-in market, and it offered the best chance of recouping investors’ money. “I didn’t really like horror films—they frightened me,” he recalled. “But, as I studied them, I began to see that there is an art to them, and there is a craft to making suspense, and I realized how interesting that process was. I would watch the suspense build in a picture, and it would be released and the audience would jump and scream, and I thought, This is kind of fantastic: they are being brought to a level here, and how long can we sustain that level? And should we break it with a scare, or should we bring it down gradually, or should we end the scene on a high note? I began to understand that making a horror film was like writing a piece of music: it’s like watching the work of a composer.”
Raimi and team shot “The Evil Dead” in a freezing cabin in Tennessee over the course of twelve weeks, burning props for firewood as they went, and improvising camera techniques to compensate for their lack of high-tech equipment. The unsteady, racing shots were done with the use of a “shaky cam,” otherwise known as a “Sam-Ram-a-cae—a camera screwed onto a two-by-four, which could be carried along at ground level. “It was like a punk horror film,” Rob Ta-pert says. “Sam was the one who _kept saying, ‘We are going to make the audience hurt.’ “
“Back then, it was a much more infantile goal,” Raimi said. “Get a response, get a visceral, audible response. Will they jump, and how high? And can we measure their movement in inches?” Joel Coen, who worked on “The Evil Dead” with a veteran editor named Edna Paul, recalls, “It was clear when we were cutting it how great it was. There was a moment when Edna and I were cutting, and Sam wanted some trims made, and I remember Edna getting very mad at him, and saying, ‘Sam, you are cutting all the humanity out of the picture.’ And Sam and I looked at each other, like ‘What is she talking about?”
I Went to visit Raimi in his apartment, and it was littered with toys and kids’ videos. Raimi has moved his family into a sublet in the East Seventies while he’s shooting “For Love of the Game” in New York, but the family home is in Brentwood, and there he is an avid gardener. “He has a big green thumb,” Bruce Campbell told me. “He kills things during the day and grows them back at night.”
I asked Raimi how old his children would have to be before he would let them watch “The Evil Dead,” and he shot back, “When they are thirty” Then he reconsidered. “I think they might enjoy ‘Evil Dead II’ when they are older, because it has a sense of humor. It is not really as vile.” Raimi seemed slightly embarrassed about his work, as if he’s yet to deliver something that has really satisfied him artistically.
Raimi says, with unguarded earnestness, that what he wants to do now is make some good movies for his kids. He sounds like any other anxious parent who doesn’t want his child to watch rubbish—a situation that is bound to be complicated when that rubbish happens to be your life’s work, and isn’t actually rubbish at all. Although it’s understandable that Raimi wants to make movies, like “A Simple Plan,” that are straightforwardly good, as opposed to movies that are so bad they’re good—or even movies that are simply bad—he can’t repudiate his pedigree.
“When I was eleven or twelve, I had a friend whose father was really wealthy, and he had one of the first video cameras,” he told me. “So we were making skits over there every day after school. We would put toy soldiers down on the ground outside, and we would pretend the camera was a helicopter coming toward them—a battle scene. And then we would cut to the soldiers themselves, and that would be us, being participants in the fight.
“But no one watching it had any idea what we were trying to communicate. People didn’t understand why we were showing toy soldiers, and then why we were suddenly bigger than they were. So we thought, O.K., how can we make this clearer? At that stage, it wasn’t even about making bad movies—we were making movies that no one could understand. The movies had to improve, just so that people could understand what we were trying to tell them. They had to improve for people even to realize that it was a bad movie. We didn’t even have that.” ♦
