The feud between Sam Raimi and Wes Craven that was hidden in their movies
Hollywood is a buffet of ego, which means it’s not unusual for people to find themselves in a heated argument when debating whose work is better. Most of the time, these feuds are made public as headlines scatter across blogs and magazines, marking who said what about who and what the repercussions might be. Sometimes, however, these arguments are buried in the very art that is being criticised.
Most people know what an easter egg in film is by now, given that it’s become commonplace for filmmakers to hide them in their pictures, adding extra layers to a film for die-hard fans and giving their movies better replay value. The majority of the time, hidden details are put in the background of movies or at the end of throwaway lines of dialogue and done with pure intentions, but that wasn’t the case with Sam Raimi and Wes Craven, who used easter eggs to take subtle digs at one another.
It all began with the release of The Hills Have Eyes in 1977. In the background of one of the scenes is a Jaws poster torn in half. While many people have speculated this doesn’t warrant reading into, and others say it’s not even a Jaws poster anyway, a number of fans read into Craven’s directing style and believed this was a dig at Stephen Spielberg. The ripping of the poster was allegedly supposed to signify that Craven could make a much scarier movie than Jaws.
Whether this was his intention or not has never been cleared up, but Sam Raimi took the potential hidden insult and ran with it when making The Evil Dead a few years down the line. Mimicking the shot from The Hills Have Eyes, Raimi put a poster of the preceding horror film in the background but had it torn in half.
There’s no debate about whether this was Raimi’s intention or not either, as he has confessed to the act since then. “There’s a torn-up poster of Jaws in [Craven’s] The Hills Have Eyes, so I thought it would be funny to tear a Hills Have Eyes poster into pieces in The Evil Dead,” he said, “To tell Wes, ‘No, this is the real horror, pal’.”
This sparked a friendly war between the two, and Craven was up to bat next. He took a sly shot in his movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, in which, in a desperate bid to stay awake, Nancy Thompson puts on The Evil Dead in her bedroom. The film has the opposite effect, as Thompson continuously falls asleep during the movie, which is Craven’s way of telling Raimi his movies are so dull they put people to sleep.
Raimi then had one of Freddy Krueger’s gloves on display in Evid Dead 2. There is no apparent jab here, and it’s instead done as a nod to Craven’s movies. While slight digs are taken here and there, any actual argument between the two is pure sensationalism, and these references should be treated as a bit of fun over anything else.
In the same interview, Raimi confirmed as much: “Years ago, I was at the Cannes Film Festival giving a radio interview – I had never met Wes – and he came up to the booth.” He continued, “I thought, ‘This is where I’m going to get old Wes’. I hid and leaped out with a terrific shout, and he just jumped out of his skin… He’s been very kind to me ever since.”
Since then, a number of other references have been buried in the likes of Scream, Halloween, and Ash vs. Evil Dead; small details pertaining to each other’s movies can be found lingering in background shots.
