Sam Raimi’s ‘Evil Dead’ Trilogy (And What Hollywood Can Learn From It)
Before Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, before Spider-Man, Sam Raimi made his mark on cinema in 1981 with The Evil Dead. The premise: Five friends travel to a lonely cabin in the woods for a weekend getaway and find a Book of the Dead that awakens a hoard of evil demons that possess and pick them off one by one. Simple, but the low-budget splatterfest starring high school buddy Bruce Campbell left viewers in shock and awe, and quickly became a cult favorite for horror fans everywhere.
Six years later, Evil Dead 2 picked up where the original left off but arrived with a more playful tone that drew on his adolescent comedic influences, primarily The Three Stooges. And after that success, the trilogy was completed in 1991 with Army of Darkness which saw Campbell’s protagonist, Ash, trapped in the Middle Ages. Raimi developed a horror trilogy that was scared to repeat itself, confident in his experimentation to evolve the grim melodrama into a slapstick fantasy while maintaining its sadistic spirit and exploring Ash’s growth into a formidable hero. Thus, I’ll pose that it’s a perfectly constructed, and completely original, trilogy that paid off tenfold. What started as a $375,000 independent film made with friends expanded into a multimillion-dollar franchise that now includes comic books, video games, a television series, and reboots currently in production.
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I am, of course, talking about an indie franchise with a niche fanbase, but you can look at Star Wars as a prime example of how this type of gamble can, and has, succeeded on a larger scale. When The Empire Strikes Back was released in 1980, Star Wars was still the biggest movie on the planet yet Lucas denied fans an identical experience. For example, where the first film opened on a desert planet, Empire opens on a frozen tundra. Rather than a movie legend like Alec Guinness playing the role of mentor, it was a Muppet that showed Luke the ways of the Force. Ultimately, rather than a hopeful, triumphant conclusion, our heroes find themselves in utter defeat in the end. Today, among critics, fans, and casual viewers alike, it’s often cited as the best installment of the franchise and considered a rare sequel that’s better, or at least just as good, as the original.
The obvious similarity between these two directors was their creative freedom via financial independence. Raimi funded the original Evil Dead with the help of family members and local investors, while Lucas cut ties with Hollywood to produce Empire mostly by himself thanks to the fortune he made in Star Wars merchandising. This sort of creative freedom does not exist in our current tentpole franchise system. In order to get the big bucks for your project, you have to bow to the creative oversight of industry studio heads, who rather seem interested in formulaic storytelling that will guarantee they make their money back. It’s an understanding that feels short-sighted because if these figures keep pulling from the same well in their storytelling, it’s going to dry up sooner rather than later.
As Marvel stays strong while going on 14 years, they’ve done a fairly good job in giving each film a new voice. Recently, with Black Widow and Eternals for instance, we’ve seen our first signs that this strategy is reaching its limit.
This week, Multiverse of Madness continues to shock fans around the world for its horror influences, many believing it should have received an R-rating. This is a step in the right direction, as this new sinister element to Doctor Strange gives him dimension and depth, allowing freedom to open doors in storytelling that were previously locked, and protecting the character from being confined by a flat archetype. It could also have been taken it much further. We’ve seen what Raimi can do with horror, and this film felt like he was being kept on a leash by the MCU’s overall vision. Though it has strong horror elements, it’s a stretch to call it a horror film by any means.
Now, I categorize myself in the camp of the casual Marvel viewer. It was Raimi’s inclusion alone that drove me to purchase a ticket to see the film on the opening weekend, and he certainly treated his fans with imagery reminiscent of his pioneering work, as well as a couple of memorable cameos from Bruce Campbell himself. This week, despite the mediocre reviews from fans, the film now remains at the top of the Box Office and is Marvel’s third highest grossing opening for a solo movie behind Spider-Man: No Way Home and Black Panther. It’s easy to connect the dots that there were many like myself in the audience to drive sales, who were curious as to what a Marvel “horror” film would look like.
Allowing Raimi that freedom to take the MCU down a darker corridor paid off. As this saga continues, that creative leash the executives allow their directors will have to continue growing to keep casual audiences interested and the stories fresh.
This has always been the case. It seems a bit pointless to pay for high profile directors like Raimi, Chloe Zhao, and Taika Waititi if you’re not going to let them make a movie with the voice that they’ve well established for themselves. Though I liked the performances in Ant-Man, did Marvel really find it was worth it to drop Edgar Wright from the project? Or could Solo have been more popular if Phil Lord and Christopher Miller had stayed on? The products that we received were fine, I’m not saying we shouldn’t enjoy them, but it feels like Disney's greatest flaw is that they don't have faith in their audience to appreciate something that’s new and different, even if the longevity of their brand is at stake.
They’re not completely out of line. Studio executives need to have confidence in their directors, but we as a collective fanbase need to accept that divisiveness is good for fandom. The purists will always be put off by something new, but proper discourse is important to allow more people into the conversation. Critical vitriol will only bring everything to a grinding halt.
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Source(s): Screen Rant