The one film scene Sam Raimi admits is “too brutal”
There wasn’t just one magical sagacious figure who would inform the horror genre in the 20th century, with several iconic creatives each working on sculpting blood-splattering filmmaking into the new millennium. Whilst the likes of John Carpenter, William Friedkin, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven and George Romero had their hand in such progress, no one was more inspirational in the development of pulp indie horror as the American filmmaker Sam Raimi.
Better known for his modern forays into the Spider-Man series in the early days of the Marvel cinematic universe back in the early 2000s, Raimi’s career began way back in the 1980s when he created one of the most iconic horror series of the decade. Creating a multitude of absurd short films before his fame in the ‘80s, Raimi’s career would begin with his obscure debut It’s Murder! in 1977, four years before The Evil Dead would roam.
Having only recently matured past his pubescent love for youthful visceral excess, Raimi was only 20 when he made the supernatural horror film, The Evil Dead, a project he now considers to be one of his all-time favourites. Low-budget and gruesomely handmade, Raimi’s film focused on five college students on vacation in a remote wooden cabin who, after finding a mysterious audiotape, accidentally release untold demons and spirits of evil.
Even though Raimi was pleased with the flick, he wasn’t totally satisfied in hindsight, even going so far as to say one sequence was “too brutal”.
In conversation with the San Diego Reader, the director reveals that the moment in question was the movie’s most infamous scene when a woman is pinned between several trees and vines crawl up her leg and inside her body. Shocking audiences at the time, the scene has since become iconic, despite Raimi stating, “I think it was unnecessarily gratuitous and a little too brutal”.
Continuing his thoughts, he adds: “And finally, because people were offended in a way that I didn’t…my goal is not to offend people. It is to entertain, thrill, scare…make them laugh, but not to offend them. But, you know, I know that a lot of 19-year-olds that are stealing cars and murdering people. Not to make that comparison, but I think my judgement was a little wrong at that time”.
Listening to his own advice for the sequel to the 1981 horror, Evil Dead II departs from the tone of the original movie and turns the horror genre into a sandbox playground, injecting a good dose of manic comedy to create one of cinema’s most innovative films. Whilst the film was still brutally violent and delightfully gory, it had gotten rid of the grisly brutality of the original horror movie.
Raimi’s later career followed suit, too, with his return to the horror genre with Drag Me to Hell in 2009, following Army of Darkness in 1992, being a genre-hybrid, perfectly combining the director’s taste for gore and absurd humour.
Take a look at the scene Raimi considers a little “too brutal” below.
