Sam Raimi once picked his favourite horror movie of all time
Alongside the likes of William Friedkin and David Cronenberg, Sam Raimi stands as one of cinema’s greatest horror directors. From his early cult classic The Evil Dead to his commercially rewarding Spider-Man movies, Raimi’s career has embraced healthy variety. The constant running throughout his catalogue is a shrewd eye for tension and perfectly executed action sequences.
Raimi’s breakthrough as a filmmaker came in 1981 with the seminal horror The Evil Dead. Despite having a low budget to work with, he managed to craft an otherworldly set and helm an early masterpiece. Setting his work apart from many contemporary horrors, Raimi invited dark comedy to The Evil Dead, adding to the entertainment value while maintaining an element of shock and outrage.
Following his work on the third Spider-Man movie starring Tobey Maguire in 2007, Raimi averted his focus back to his most comfortable domain of comedy horror, starting work on Drag Me To Hell. In an interview with Empire at around this time, Raimi was asked whether he had been itching to return to horror for a long time.
“Yes,” he replied. “I always appreciated the craft of making these horror films. And then, with this company that I’m involved with, Ghost House Pictures, I got to watch, as a producer, other directors working. So watching Takashi Shimizu work on The Grudge, I would see the dailies come in and think, ‘Oh, that’s how he did it,’ or, ‘What an interesting way to make her move.’ I’d get really excited watching these directors work on their films and was thinking, ‘How come they’re having all the fun?’ I was just producing, I’m not making the creative choices. Some producers do, but I don’t – I really let the directors make their own movies.”
While Shimzu’s popular 2004 horror The Grudge inspired Raimi’s return to horror, The Evil Dead and his early interest in the genre was piqued long before. As a young movie fanatic, Raimi was taken by his sister to see George A. Romero’s seminal zombie movie of 1968, Night of the Living Dead; it turned out to be a night he’d never forget.
In a 2022 interview with Den of Geek, Raimi picked the movie out as his favourite of the horror genre but recalled his rather anguishing first impression. “I really had never been so terrified in my life,” Sam Raimi admitted. “I was screaming and shrieking, begging my sister to take me home, and she was trying to shut me up.”
“I’d never experienced horror like that before,” he added. “It felt so real, like a docu-horror. I had never seen a black-and-white movie in a movie theatre before; it looked like a documentary. There was nothing Hollywood about it — it was just unrelenting and complete madness and very upsetting for me.”
Watch the trailer for Night of the Living Dead below.
