The secret rivalry of Sam Raimi and Wes Craven: “This is pop horror”
In the 1970s, two of the biggest names in horror were fighting in plain sight, right there on the cinema screens. In a back and forth exchange between their movies, Wes Craven and Sam Raimi were battling it out.
It all began in 1977 with the release of Wes Craven’s horrifying The Hills Have Eyes, a movie about a gaggle of cannibals on the hunt for a snack. When Raimi went to see it, he was obsessed. “When I saw The Hills Have Eyes, I thought it was one of the most gut-wrenching horror movies I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said, packing on the praise for Craven’s flick.
In particular, one especially gory scene stuck with him. “They have a scene where these hill people come into this trailer. They completely massacre the people that were living in the trailer and they take a parakeet, bite its head off and drink it like a glass of blood. And they come across this baby and wonder whether they should raise it as their own or eat the baby because baby is good meat,” he said, recounting it with a morbid glee.
But the kicker is the moral panic it stirs in the viewer, as Raimi admitted, “It’s such a horrible scene that you’re thinking, ‘eat the baby. Don’t raise it as your own, please don’t do that. That’s even more heinous.’”
He was sitting there in the cinema thinking it was a masterpiece, then he noticed a little detail. “After they leave and the people come back to the trailer, they view all the carnage and one thing they see is a picture of a Jaws poster ripped in half,” Raimi said. To him, this was a message being sent.
He explained, “I took it to mean that Wes Craven, the director of the movie, was saying ‘Jaws was just pop horror, what I have here is real horror.’” To him, it was Craven rating himself and putting himself higher than his peers. He loved the pettiness of it, and so, in 1981, when he released the first Evil Dead movie, he did the same.
“I took a Hills Have Eyes poster and in Evil Dead, I put it in the cellar and I ripped it in half to say, ‘no, Wes, your picture was pop horror. This is real horror’,” Raimi said as he fired Craven’s own shot back against him.
But really, it was all just a joke. Raimi even called the move “a homage to Craven,” but then the other director responded again. “Now Wes Craven has responded by putting a clip of Evil Dead in his picture,” Raimi said as he spotted the same petty action once again, but now with a clip of his movie playing on a TV screen in a scene of Nightmare on Elm Street, with Craven sending the same message again.
Not only was this a game of the two directors riffing back and forth on who was more serious, but it also seemed to genuinely be a motivator, daring them to make their movies better, more horrific, but less cliché. Really, they were pushing each other to improve.
“So I’m not sure where I’m going from there. I’ll have to figure something out,” Raimi said in that old interview, and he did as he placed a Freddy Krueger glove in the background of Evil Dead 2, continuing their tit for tat.
