Sam Raimi certainly doesn’t look like the king of gross-out horror movies. A
mild-mannered, soft-spoken fellow with a friendly face and endearing hangdog
eyes, Raimi could be mistaken for an academic or a schoolteacher. He wears a
smart suit (“I always dress up for actors and journalists”), offers me a
drink and keenly asks my opinion of his new film, Drag Me to Hell.
Well, it’s gross in the best way, and the only place to begin is with the
more gruesome elements of the film. Such as the scene in which Christine,
the heroine, swallows a gallon of rotting body fluids pouring out of a
corpse’s mouth or a fly crawls in and out of her nose and nudges its way
into her mouth while she sleeps.
Raimi is a minor deity of the contemporary horror-film scene. His first
feature, The Evil Dead (1981) was a gorefest made for just $80,000,
most of it spent on gruesome limb-chopping and blood-spewing special
effects. Although he has made other types of films, notably the Spider-Man
trilogy, his heart belongs in horror.
For all its grisly special effects, Drag Me to Hell is about the most
fun you will have at the cinema this year. Raimi’s unique talent is to make
you laugh even while you squirm. One of his first questions to me is how the
other people in the theatre reacted. “Were they scared?” he asks anxiously.
“Were they laughing?”
The film is so good that it has even snagged an important midnight screening
slot at the Cannes Film Festival tonight. It follows the twentysomething
Christine (played with resilient spirit by Alison Lohman) who works as a
loan officer in a bank. When she turns down a request for a loan from an old
Gypsy woman with one eye, she is cursed and harassed by the spirit of an
ancient demon that will stop at nothing until it, yes, drags her to Hell.
Christine’s bewildered boyfriend Clay is played by the rising star Justin Long
and the malevolent Gypsy woman, Mrs Ganush, by the character actress Lorna
Raver. She steals the show, especially when she removes her rotting dentures
to attack Lohman with her gums. “Alison swallowed a lot of fluids on this
movie,” Raimi chuckles. “It’s disgusting what the audience wants nowadays.
It’s really sad. I am ashamed and embarrassed by the crowd these days.”
Raimi relishes horror in all its forms, but his influences are the classics of
the Seventies, films such as The Exorcist and The Omen which,
he says, are “old-fashioned horror and really scary”. But he doesn’t want to
upset his audience and is not a huge fan of the recent torture porn films,
which he believes have tried to take the genre too far. Drag Me to Hell
is supposed to be a rip-roaring good time,” he says. “It is meant to have a
feeling of a ghost-train ride at a fair. There is no pretence about the
cheapness of those trains; they’re just trying to get you to jump. That’s
like the film: it’s OK if it appears cheap as long as it’s fun and spooky.”
Raimi talks with such boyish enthusiasm that it’s easy to forget that he is a
powerful figure in Hollywood, a man who parlayed his modest Evil Dead
beginnings into the Spider-Man series, three films that are among the
most successful to date.
Indeed it was after nearly ten years of working on those epic extravaganzas
that he took a break to return to his horror roots. “I haven’t had final cut
since the first Evil Dead film,” he explains, referring to the
practice whereby the studio grants a director total control of a film. “I
just wanted complete artistic control this time.”
Raimi was born in 1959 in Birmingham, Michigan, the fourth of five children to
parents in the retail business. He became fascinated by movies when he was a
child and started making Super 8 films with his teenage pal Bruce Campbell,
who would go on to to star in the Evil Dead films (and take cameos in
all three Spider-Man films). At college in 1978 Raimi, Campbell and
Robert Tapert, the roommate of Raimi’s brother Ivan, teamed up to make a
32-minute horror film, Within the Woods, and through that raised
money for the feature version, The Evil Dead.
“I almost died of cold making The Evil Dead,” he says of the
shoot in the Tennessee woods. “My hands were covered in Karo syrup [which he
famously used for the blood and pus effects], I was freezing and I couldn’t
even load the film. It was a nightmare.”
The Evil Dead not only took off at the box office — made for $375,000
(£246,000) it has so far taken nearly $30 million — it was also a hit on
video. Dropping out of college, Raimi started work on Evil Dead II
and then bigger films with bigger stars, such as the western The Quick
and the Dead with Sharon Stone, Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, Darkman
with Liam Neeson and A Simple Plan with Billy Bob Thornton.
Unfortunately, for all their pedigree, none of these films did very well.
“I have never really made a lot of successful films,” he says. “I had a small
cult following with those horror movies, but in Hollywood you have to have
some hits behind you to get final cut.”
Those years weren’t always easy. Raimi tried to get a Batman
project going, but Tim Burton beat him to it, and he was turned down from
making a film of the comic book The Shadow. And, like any director,
he had trouble with some actors, notably Gene Hackman on The Quick and
the Dead. “He was very difficult,” Raimi recalls with a shiver. “I still
haven’t figured out to this day what the problem was with Gene. But I learnt
a lot from people like him about what not to do.”
He wasn’t going to let rejections or clashes get him down, however, and he
recalls wonderful experiences with actors such as Crowe (“I loved working
with him”), DiCaprio (“he was great”) and Cate Blanchett (“she is
mesmerising”).
By the time Spider-Man came along a decade ago he felt he was ready to
take on a blockbuster. “I knew that character. I love Spider-Man and I felt
I had to make that movie.” But by the third film, as fans and audiences
would agree, the series was in need of some creative renewal. “I never had
final cut on the Spider-Man films,” he explains. “They left me alone
on the first two but the third was a little more of a collaboration.”
Did the studio interfere? “Well, it wasn’t the studio necessarily,” he says,
then pauses. “Sometimes collaborations work and sometimes they don’t. I
don’t want to say that somebody meddled because it’s not exactly true, but I
think that if there had been a singular vision it would have been better.
After Spider-Man 3 I just had to get into a place where I had a
singular vision on a new film.”
He says that he isn’t bitter or angry at the Spider-Man series,
which he describes as “living in the lap of film luxury”. In fact, now that Drag
Me to Hell has given him a new lease of life, he is enthusiastically
preparing Spider-Man 4, which is scheduled to reach cinemas in May
2011. “I like the big toys that you get to play with and the big canvas you
get to paint on, but it’s just a little more removed from the one-on-one you
have with the technicians on a smaller film like Drag,” he says. “I
like having a closer relationship with the crew.”
And so it is with Drag Me to Hell. Tapert is the producer and Ivan
Raimi co-wrote it. “Ivan is an emergency-room doctor and that’s what he
loves, but he also likes writing,” Raimi says. “That’s why he is an ER
doctor versus a different type of doctor, because the same group of people
don’t rely on him all the time, so they don’t mind if he goes away for three
weeks with me to write something. It’s like spending great family time with
him but even better because we are sharing ideas.”
Meanwhile Raimi and his wife Gillian, the daughter of the late actor Lorne
Greene (the star of the classic TV series Bonanza and the original Battlestar
Galactica), continue to raise their five children in California. “She is
really supportive of my work,” he says. “She thought the finished movie was
very funny.”
By way of a farewell, Raimi tells me how he best likes to see a horror movie —
in a cinema where the seats are close together and the audience can feel and
hear each other’s fear. “I want to be able to hear them gasping loudly,” he
says. “My favourite part of horror movies is screaming together and laughing
together.” Drag Me to Hell should have them doing both.
Drag Me to Hell is released on May 27
