The movie Bill Hader compared to “listening to punk rock for the first time”
Bill Hader knew he wanted to be a filmmaker after watching a classic “splatter horror” film when he was a teenager.
Hader became the most successful alum of Saturday Night Live to emerge since Will Ferrell, but he’s proven to be much more than just a comedian. Although he had several early credits as an executive producer or co-writer on projects that he appeared in, Hader became the showrunner, director, and creator of the acclaimed mockumentary series Documentary Now! and the Emmy Award-winning HBO comedy Barry.
Barry, in particular, was a true sign of Hader’s evolution as a storyteller based on the dramatic tonal shifts that occurred throughout the series’ four-season run. What began as a quirky constitutional comedy about an assassin who takes up acting slowly became a riveting anti-hero story about the inherent violence within a disturbed psychopath. It became strange for Barry to be competing at the Emmy Awards against shows like Abbott Elementary or Schitt’s Creek, as it had begun to feel closer to a horror story than a sitcom.
Given that Hader directed most of the later seasons of Barry, it’s no real shock to learn he’s a massive horror buff. He’s been championing classic cinema since the early days of his career, regularly encouraging fans to dig into older films. That might have something to do with his own experience – it was watching Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead as a teenager that first made Hader want to become a filmmaker.
Hader told The AV Club that he first stumbled upon the 1981 cult classic when staying up until the morning watching USA Up All Night. The experience changed the way that he considered the feasibility of actually making a movie.
“That was like listening to punk rock for the first time, where you went, ‘Oh, this is effective, but I feel like I can do this with my camera and my friends’,” Hader told the outlet. “So that was a big one.”
Although The Evil Dead wasn’t the only iconic horror film to come out of the early ’80s, the story behind its production was inspirational for many aspiring filmmakers within Hader’s age bracket. Shot on a shoestring budget, The Evil Dead was a passion project for Raimi, who cast his lifelong best friend Bruce Campbell in the lead role of Ash. Although shooting in the middle of the woods with faulty equipment was notoriously challenging, Raimi’s efforts took off when The Evil Dead became a word-of-mouth hit.
Hader wouldn’t fully actualise his dream of becoming a director until many years later, but he experienced a full-circle moment when shooting Barry. It was amidst filming that he was introduced to the actress Jessy Hodges, whose mother, Ellen Sandweiss, had starred alongside Campbell in the original The Evil Dead.
“She’s like, ‘Oh my mom was in this horror movie Evil Dead,’” Hader remembered. “I’m like, ‘That’s one of the reasons I picked up a camera and started making shorts with my friends’.”
Now that Barry is concluded, it seems only a matter of time before Hader gets to direct his own movie, which seems like it would more than likely be in the horror genre. Interestingly, Raimi is also returning to his roots with the upcoming horror film Send Help, which seems to exist in the same darkly comedic register as The Evil Dead. Perhaps, there’s another future filmmaker out there who’ll be inspired to get into filmmaking now that Hader and Raimi are at the height of their respective powers.
