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\n Clockwise from top left: Spider-Man 2, The Quick and the Dead, The Evil Dead, and Drag Me to Hell.
\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Everett Collection (TriStar, Columbia, Universal), Rosebud Releasing\n <\/p>\n
In some ways, Sam Raimi is the ultimate filmmaker success story. He went from messing around in the woods with a camera, his buddies, and goop he could hurl at them to helming a record-breaking, era-defining blockbuster. It\u2019s crazy that the same goofy guy who made The Evil Dead also made Spider-Man. Look at his full filmography, though, and it also makes complete sense. That\u2019s what\u2019s so charming about Raimi.<\/p>\n
A nice midwestern boy with a love of slapstick, genre-blending, and Dutch angles, Raimi is a unique presence behind the camera. Once he got his start with The Evil Dead and further honed his style with Evil Dead II, Raimi was somewhat in the filmmaking wilderness \u2014 a respected but niche genre guy \u2014 until Spider-Man swung into his life. Those three movies, while sensational and (mostly) beloved hits, ended up being a tricky web to escape from. After a pair of one-offs, he went nearly a decade between films until another superhero movie lured him back to the genre in 2022. Send Help, his new pulpy deserted-island two-hander, is a throwback to his output before all blockbuster expectations \u2014 and a fine excuse to see where all 16 of the movies in Raimi\u2019s filmography stack up.<\/p>\n
The most charitable thing you can say about Raimi\u2019s James Franco\u2013led Wizard of Oz origin story is that you can see the appeal of having the director play in 3-D. Raimi\u2019s eclectic camerawork and seemingly endless supply of visual gags had so far played out across two dimensions; what if he added another axis to his Dutch angles and let his visual inventiveness leap from the screen? The 3-D gimmick obviously doesn\u2019t come through on rewatches at home, but even so, you can tell that Raimi wasn\u2019t truly going wild \u2014 and even if he were, there\u2019s only so much it could\u2019ve helped. Oz the Great and Powerful is the first \u2014 and so far only \u2014 movie you can tell Raimi has no passion for. With several actors giving career-worst performances while surrounded by CGI visuals that feel empty despite all the intended whimsy, Oz the Great and Powerful makes Raimi\u2019s success with Spider-Man feel that much more amazing. It\u2019s not just a matter of combining Raimi with a valuable IP; all of Raimi\u2019s other movies have an earnestness that Oz the Great and Powerful lacks.<\/p>\n
For the Love of the Game is the Sam Raimi movie that feels the least like a Sam Raimi movie: It\u2019s more like Kevin Costner was behind the camera in addition to being on the pitcher\u2019s mind. The lack of Raimi\u2019s trademark flourishes or any hint of genre isn\u2019t inherently a bad thing. By his own admission, Raimi wanted to try something different. There\u2019s plenty to love about the ball game in For the Love of the Game, and Raimi\u2019s love of baseball comes through in the sports sequences. The problem is everything that takes place off the diamond, as Costner\u2019s soon-to-retire pitcher reflects on his entire life, Dewey Cox\u2013style (hi, John C. Reilly in a supporting role!), in between at-bats while attempting to throw a perfect game. These flashbacks, regrettably, take up significantly more run time than the baseball and are tragically boring. Costner\u2019s on-and-off relationship with Kelly Preston\u2019s character definitively answers the question of \u201cHow can you not be romantic about baseball?\u201d It\u2019s easy, when this is the romance in a baseball movie.<\/p>\n
Is Spider-Man 3 fairly or unfairly maligned? It\u2019s hard to say, as some of the most-mocked parts of the Tobey Maguire Spidey trilogy-capper are also the clearest Raimi trademarks, like the sequence where a Venom-corrupted, emo Peter Parker breaks bad by dancing to cool jazz. With a little bit of distance from Spider-Man 3\u2019s disappointing release, it\u2019s easier to make the case that this only semi-ironically rocks. There\u2019s a sincerity to Spider-Man 3, combined with Raimi\u2019s still deft understanding of Peter and Mary Jane\u2019s relationship, that this film\u2019s devotees point to in an attempt to reclaim it. But come on: Spider-Man 3 is obviously, awkwardly overstuffed, and not even a heartfelt performance by Thomas Haden Church as Sandman can make up for the fact that it has too many villains and too many plots. In Raimi\u2019s defense, he wasn\u2019t the one who wanted to add Venom and Eddie Brock to this movie. That was producer Avi Arad\u2019s idea, no doubt because Venom was a popular character and there was a sense that every superhero sequel needed to one-up the previous one regardless of whether or not it fit the story. This tendency would plague many comic-book adaptations to follow; many of those movies didn\u2019t have somebody as distinctive as Raimi in the director\u2019s chair.<\/p>\n
Raimi\u2019s second proper movie, written in collaboration with his then-roommates the Coen brothers, teases everything that we will come to love from Raimi and the Coens. The boys just don\u2019t quite have it yet \u2014 which is somewhat odd to say considering that Raimi had already made The Evil Dead, a debut movie that showcases an insane amount of Having It right from the jump. Part of that can be chalked up to how typically friendly horror is as a genre for rookie auteurs in a way that a slapstick crime romp \u2014 or however else you might describe this tale where a loser gets caught in the middle of an insane and insanely contrived murder spree \u2014 might require a little more finesse. Raimi\u2019s trademark visual style perhaps never goes more bonkers than it is here, but there\u2019s an insanity that reads as sloppy compared to the deft mastery of his later movies. And yet, you watch this nutso film and you can totally see how this guy could make a pretty great Spider-Man movie. Crimewave is absolutely a hoot and a holler if you can forgive some of the madcap incoherency.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s so good to have Raimi back making another little genre movie, even if it has been more than a decade and a half since his last one, 2009\u2019s Drag Me to Hell. Few directors who start small before reaching blockbuster heights, like Raimi did with Spider-Man, are interested in making lower-stakes films after that, and fewer still are able to actually recapture the scrappy energy of their earlier filmography. Raimi deserves credit for trying, albeit less frequently than we might hope, and he pulled it off with Drag Me to Hell. He\u2019s less successful with Send Help, a movie that has some fun gnarly moments as meek employee Rachel McAdams and bad boss Dylan O\u2019Brien\u2019s time stranded on a deserted island shifts from Cast Away to Misery. It all feels just a bit more polished than it should, as though Raimi was unable to shed some of the big-studio production hallmarks even for this January-release genre flick. It\u2019s not just the CGI \u2014 though that\u2019s certainly part of it. Watching McAdams slaughter a weightless computer-generated wild boar can\u2019t help but make you pine for practical effects like Bruce Campbell pretending he\u2019s being attacked by his own hand. It\u2019s all a little too crisp and too clean when it could be grimier. Still, it\u2019s a new Raimi movie, as welcome a sight to movegoers as a rescue ship might be to castaways.<\/p>\n
Raimi takes his kinetic visual energy and gets a little drowsy with it for this supernatural southern Gothic, the last in a series of films you could call his attempt to make \u201cgrown-up movies\u201d before getting the Spider-Man gig. Cate Blanchett plays a mother in very rural Georgia (with an accent to match \u2014 everybody in The Gift is laying on the drawl) who seems to have psychic visions. These come in handy, and get her into trouble, when her clairvoyance becomes the only lead in a missing-person case. The atmosphere is thick and swampy, and there are a few fun Raimi hallmarks. For the most part, The Gift is caught between being a straightforward mystery and a more outlandish genre romp about a lady with ESP. It\u2019s effective, though you see yourself having visions about what a pulpier version of The Gift that were a bit less concerned with respectability might have been.<\/p>\n
The Marvel cinematic universe has a reputation for swallowing up directors and stripping them of any of their personal artistic sensibilities in favor of the MCU\u2019s house style. Multiverse of Madness manages to feel like a Raimi movie, though given that the horror-tinged superhero romp is basically the middle of a genre Venn diagram with Evil Dead and Spider-Man on either side, it\u2019s perhaps less distinctive than you might hope. (Raimi, making his first movie in nearly a decade, stepped in when Scott Derrickson, director of the first Doctor Strange, left the sequel due to creative differences.) The first chunk of the film, which follows Benedict Cumberbatch\u2019s Sorcerer Supreme across alternate realities as he fends off an insane Scarlet Witch, is bogged down with connections to past movies and a Disney+ TV show and is competent if a smidge bland in the way many later MCU movies are. It\u2019s not until Scarlet Witch explodes Black Bolt\u2019s head and turns John Krasinski\u2019s Mr. Fantastic cameo into superhuman spaghetti that you can sense the franchise reins loosening. Even the CGI, a consistent problem with Raimi\u2019s late-career horror, is excusable here because it fits with the MCU\u2019s visual language. Multiverse of Madness isn\u2019t close to Raimi\u2019s best horror movie or best superhero movie, but there\u2019s a refreshing bit of fun in how goofily he crashes the two into each other.<\/p>\n
If Multiverse of Madness was Raimi attempting to get weird in an era where superhero movies were too big, important, and established, Darkman is a relic of a time before there were really any sorts of expectations for the genre. Born from Raimi\u2019s desire to make a movie about pulp hero the Shadow before he was denied the rights by Universal, Darkman is an original creation, starring Liam Neeson as a scientist who is disfigured in a mob attack and given superpowers thanks to an experimental treatment. These abilities, combined with his invention of a synthetic skin that allows him to impersonate anybody, allow Darkman to go on a roaring rampage of revenge. It\u2019s as much a homage of old monster movies of the \u201930s and \u201940s, with their hideous, tortured protagonists, as it is a superhero movie \u2014 asking, \u201cWhat if Frankenstein\u2019s monster or the Phantom of the Opera kicked ass?\u201d It\u2019s gnarly, weird, and undeniably fun. Raimi would shave some of the edges off for his eventual superhero triumph with Spider-Man. Crucially, he didn\u2019t shave off all of them, and you can see as much Spidey in Darkman as you can detect dark grotesquery in the web-slinger\u2019s adventures.<\/p>\n
The cabin in the woods might be gone, replaced with a Ray Harryhausen\u2013style swords-and-sandals epic, but Army of Darkness retains all of the gonzo energy of the previous Evil Dead. Picking up with Bruce Campbell\u2019s Ash after he found himself transported to the Middle Ages along with his chainsaw hand and broomstick, Army of Darkness does away with any vestige of serious horror that might have remained from the first Evil Dead in favor of turning Ash into a goofy, gloopy, gory Deadite-slaying hero with cheesy one-liners. The bizarre, impressively animated undead ghouls and monsters are fuel for a gag engine operating at full tilt and straining against the limitations of its budget. It\u2019s a fitting conclusion to the first chapter of Raimi\u2019s moviemaking; having taken outlandish horror-comedy as far as it could go and then some, the only way forward was a change of pace. It\u2019s hard to fathom what a fourth Raimi Evil Dead movie could have possibly looked like. Could he have found a way to not make it exhausting? Perhaps, but maybe it\u2019s for the best that he did what people in these movies seemingly can\u2019t do and let the Deadites rest.<\/p>\n
After three huge Spider-Man movies, Raimi had a li\u2019l low-stakes fun. Drag Me to Hell is a gleefully mean-spirited horror romp, to the point where there\u2019s almost an innocence to it. You could make the argument that its real monster is capitalism, as that\u2019s what prompts Alison Lohman\u2019s bank-loan officer Christine to deny an old Romani woman an extension. That doesn\u2019t absolve her of the woman\u2019s curse, and the film doesn\u2019t let her off the hook in any way. Drag Me to Hell delights in tormenting Christine before the ending, a shocking twist that\u2019s so hellishly dark it\u2019s hysterical. Any quibbles you might have \u2014 like the shoddy CGI, which does detract from the otherwise tangible scares and gags \u2014 are easily excused because Raimi can just knock a nasty little piece of work like this out seemingly just for funsies. He should do it more often.<\/p>\n
The most successful of Raimi\u2019s run of \u201cgrown-up\u201d movies that began in the late \u201990s and ended when he got Spider-Man, A Simple Plan finds darkness without any supernatural or genre twists. That Raimi\u2019s tongue is not in his cheek when he puts his characters through a torment they unleashed upon themselves only makes A Simple Plan more effective. Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton star as Minnesota brothers who stumble upon a huge trove of cash inside a crashed airplane and resolve to keep it a secret for themselves, a choice that unleashes deception, paranoia, and deadly consequences. Comparisons to Fargo, which Raimi\u2019s buddies the Coens had released two years earlier, are natural, but Fargo has a dry sense of humor while A Simple Plan is more content to linger in the quiet sadness of its tragedy. It\u2019s a real outlier in his filmography; unlike the would-be millionaires at the center of A Simple Plan, Raimi pulls it off.<\/p>\n
The Quick and the Dead isn\u2019t a spaghetti western in the traditional sense of the term, but the description still applies if you think of it as Raimi throwing spaghetti at the wall of this gunslinging great time. It all sticks \u2014 every Dutch angle, inventively silly camera placement, and enthusiastic heightening of high-noon suspense. Boasting an absurd cast whose ranks include Gene Hackman, Sharon Stone, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Russell Crowe (the latter two of whom had yet to fully explode into superstardom), The Quick and the Dead is maximalist Raimi benefiting from a very tight premise: A ruthless criminal is holding a quick-draw contest in the Wild West, and several of the participants have hidden agendas. The action is, by the very nature of the duels, quick and repetitive, but Raimi goes for broke making sure each one is distinct in the way it blows the viewer (and the loser) off their feet.<\/p>\n
The key to Raimi\u2019s whole deal is that he\u2019s extremely earnest, despite what the frequently flippant or goofy nature of a lot of his filmography might suggest. Raimi\u2019s love of Spider-Man comics was what got him this hotly contested directing job in the first place. He took the great responsibility of bringing the hero to life with unabashed sincerity, understanding that the bright colors and teenage melodrama were goals to swing toward, not shy away from. (That he knew how to make a movie read like an exciting comic book certainly helped \u2014 thwipping between skyscrapers basically begs to be filmed with a Dutch angle.) And more so than any Spidey who has succeeded him, Tobey Maguire\u2019s Peter Parker comes off as a loser. Raimi loves this about him, and yet he still puts him through hell like just about every other Raimi protagonist, though now with a more formally heroic slant. Willem Dafoe\u2019s Green Goblin is so iconic that the MCU basically had no choice but to bring him back 20 years later in a new continuity. While there were superhero movies before Spider-Man, like the 2000 X-Men film, it\u2019s Raimi\u2019s movie that set the tone that the whole genre would try to emulate, snarkily run away from, and then come crawling back to.<\/p>\n
Before you get mad at Evil Dead II\u2019s placement at third on this list and not first (or at the very least second), where no doubt countless Raimi fans believe it belongs, please understand that Evil Dead II is perfect. A hybrid of sequel and remake that can best be described as a higher-budget, more confident do-over, II is an immaculate live-action Looney Tunes. Raimi\u2019s control of the slapstick humor, blood, and black bile is virtuosic; the action is just shy of being unrelenting as he spends 80 minutes and change fucking with Ash rather than bothering with such antiquated notions as \u201cplot.\u201d (Unlike its predecessor, Evil Dead II doesn\u2019t even pretend to hesitate when it comes to having its characters read the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis \u2014 Deadites gotta get unleashed for the fun to start!) It\u2019s exactly for this reason that II, while a perfect object, is narrowly less impressive than The Evil Dead. One is an exercise that only Sam Raimi could do; the other manages to do an absurd amount of gags despite being burdened with the weight of being a real movie.<\/p>\n
Sam Raimi\u2019s debut film didn\u2019t create the idea of a spooky cabin in the woods, but it certainly codified the trope. The chilling magic of The Evil Dead is how elemental it feels, which is extra impressive when you remember that it was made on the cheap by a 20-year-old and his strong-chinned friend. Even though some of the scares and gags are elaborate, bloody affairs, there\u2019s an efficiency to how the The Evil Dead introduces its victims, summons the Deadites, and quickly cuts them down, leaving only Ash as the \u201cfinal guy\u201d in a bit of an inversion from the usual last character standing in a horror flick. This is the only movie of the three where Ash resembles a real person rather than just a character to fuck with or a braggadocious hero in search of a chainsaw hand. The rest of Raimi\u2019s horror output more openly embraced comedy; this first film finds a more unsettling balance of the genres. For as much as the special effects and gore are outlandish, The Evil Dead leaves an ick on you.<\/p>\n
The greatest superhero movie ever made (give or take The Incredibles, which came out the same year) does not kick off with our hero beating a costumed villain in an epic fight scene. It opens with Peter Parker attempting \u2014 and failing \u2014 to deliver a pizza on time. Peter\u2019s human struggles are the focus of this masterpiece, and they\u2019ve only gotten harder since he became superhuman. The villain, Alfred Molina\u2019s Doctor Octopus, overflows with humanity, too. The robotic tendrils driving him mad aren\u2019t just a gimmick, they\u2019re a tragedy. (They\u2019re scary, too! The operation-room scene is possibly the most effective horror sequence Raimi\u2019s ever filmed, and that includes three Evil Dead movies.) Spider-Man\u2019s struggle against Doc Ock is thrilling \u2014 especially the subway set piece, an action sequence that no other superhero movie has come close to matching \u2014 but Spider-Man 2 is really about Peter Parker\u2019s struggle with Spider-Man. It\u2019s a superhero movie that\u2019s actually about heroism. It\u2019s the genre and Raimi at their absolute best.<\/p>\n
Great Directors<\/p>\n