Sam Raimi
- In full:
- Samuel Marshall Raimi
- Also Known As:
- Samuel Marshall Raimi
Sam Raimi (born October 23, 1959, Royal Oak, Michigan, U.S.) is an American film and television director, producer, and screenwriter whose inventive camera techniques and wry humor breathed life into the horror genre. Saimi also found success with a series of blockbuster adaptations of comic books, most notably the Spider-Man trilogy (2002, 2004, 2007).
Early life and The Evil Dead
Raimi began experimenting with filmmaking at a very early age. By his teen years he was already an active member of a circle of amateur actors and directors in the Detroit area. Among this group were his brother Ted and aspiring actor Bruce Campbell, both of whom became staples in Raimi productions.
In 1977 Raimi enrolled at Michigan State University, where he produced the 8-mm films The Happy Valley Kid (1977) and It’s Murder (1977). These modest efforts provided valuable experience for Raimi and his associates, and their next project, the short film Within the Woods (1978), served as the test reel for what is arguably Raimi’s most famous work, The Evil Dead (1981). Although its low-budget origins were apparent and its level of gore bordered on the cartoonish, The Evil Dead became one of the most influential horror films of all time, and Raimi’s use of “shaky cam”—a handheld camera technique that was intended to replicate the point-of-view of a given character or object—was widely emulated. Although his next film, Crimewave (1985), was hobbled when studio executives fundamentally altered the story with editorial cuts, it was written by Joel and Ethan Coen and began an association between Raimi and the brothers that proved to be mutually beneficial.
The Quick and the Dead and A Simple Plan
The cult success of The Evil Dead led producer Dino De Laurentiis to fund a sequel, and Evil Dead II (1987), with Campbell returning in the lead role, added a camp, slapstick twist to the original film’s formula. Raimi experimented with the superhero genre in Darkman (1990) before completing the Evil Dead trilogy with Army of Darkness (1992).
Raimi cowrote the Coen brothers’ comedy The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) and created the television series M.A.N.T.I.S. (1994–97) before returning to the director’s chair for the western The Quick and the Dead (1995). Raimi’s next projects, the crime drama A Simple Plan (1998) and the baseball romance For the Love of the Game (1999), were stylistic departures, but the former was a critical hit, and it earned a pair of Academy Award nominations.
Comic-book adaptations and later films
Raimi experienced his greatest box-office success with a trio of films that marked a new wave of Hollywood interest in comic-book adaptations. Spider-Man (2002), the story of a wall-crawling crimefighter who derived his superheroic powers from a radioactive spider bite, was a critical and commercial smash. It spawned a pair of sequels, Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007), and the trilogy grossed roughly $2.5 billion worldwide. All three films featured Tobey Maguire as the lead character and Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson.
Raimi revisited the horror genre for Drag Me to Hell (2009) and directed the big-budget family adventure film Oz the Great and Powerful (2013). Although a critical disappointment, Raimi’s take on L. Frank Baum’s mythos was a hit with audiences. That same year Raimi produced Evil Dead, a remake that replaced the original film’s absurd gore with the brutally rendered violence more typical of 21st-century horror offerings. In 2022 he directed Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which marked his return to the world of superheroes. The action-adventure movie, which centers on a Marvel Comics cult character, was a huge box-office hit. It starred Benedict Cumberbatch and Elizabeth Olsen.
Raimi also created (with his brother Ivan Raimi and Tom Spezialy) the action-comedy TV series Ash vs Evil Dead, which aired from 2015 to 2018; he also directed the first episode.