Made in the director’s vision: the recent horror movie Sam Raimi calls “fantastic”
The modern world of horror cinema owes a lot to the filmmaking of Sam Raimi, a pioneer of indie cinema in the early 1980s whose blend of slapstick comedy and visceral on-screen terror has since inspired the likes of James Gunn, Ti West and James Wan. Entering the industry in 1981 with The Evil Dead, Raimi introduced the industry to his frenetic DIY style, and students of cinema were gifted a source of constant inspiration.
A truly versatile filmmaker, although Raimi started in the horror genre, he has since made crime thrillers, romance flicks and even superhero epics, being partly responsible for the boom in comic-book filmmaking at the turn of the new millennium thanks to the success of his Spider-Man trilogy. Utilising the technology of the time, the titular superhero swinging through the New York streets represented Hollywood’s embrace of CGI and new cinematic developments.
Still, despite departing from the genre that made a name for himself on several occasions, he is never far from his roots, directing the highly underrated horror movie Drag Me to Hell two years after he completed his Spider-Man trilogy and infusing his 2022 Marvel flick Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness with a lick of his own identity.
Despite this, unless you count the 2015 TV series Ash vs Evil Dead, which he co-created and directed one episode of, Raimi hasn’t created a horror movie since 2009’s Drag Me to Hell. While fans doggedly request another slap-stick horror from the master himself, Raimi is preparing an entirely different project for the near future, the sci-fi action flick World War 3, while appreciating the genre from afar.
During a recent interview with Jason Delgado, for example, Raimi shed light on his thoughts regarding some of the greatest horror movies of recent years, naming Zach Cregger’s Barbarian as a stand-out favourite.
Calling the 2022 movie “fantastic”, it doesn’t come as too much of a surprise that Raimi loves this peculiar horror gem, with Cregger injecting the film with an idiosyncratic approach to comedy that mirrors the early work of Raimi. Telling the story of a woman who goes to stay at an Airbnb only to discover that the house is already being rented, Barbarian takes a number of bizarre turns that subvert the genre and even asks some important social questions.
Utilising brutal horror, strange comedy and several styles of filmmaking that pay homage to the history of filmmaking itself, Barbarian feels like the kind of work that Raimi himself would have produced back in his heyday.
