Why I Love Sam Raimi, Part 1
STELLA: I just have always really loved horror movies. Especially Sam Raimi. I mean the first Evil Dead is just so incredible, for its time, for any time. I first saw it when I was a teenager, it was already 15 years old then. I saw it super low quality, like a third or fourth generation VHS tape but still it just blew me away. Of course in many ways it is really dated, but the tension that it builds just sweeps you up, and it’s so outrageous, so unapologetically horrific and gory and gross and just a ton of fun. And the sequels and the TV show all just continue that outrageousness in new ways, he ended up being more deliberate about adding comedy to the horror, which is just genius. And his later stuff, I mean he did a lot of Hollywood stuff and got kind of tame, I mean he was clearly honing his craft and playing around with different genres, which is cool I guess, but then Drag Me to Hell comes out and it’s just a blast, funny and scary and ridiculous and tense. You can just really see the gleeful kid who loved going to movies in the 70s in Detroit. He’s still there, Sam Raimi has nurtured that kid within himself, and he’s brought it out within all of us.
…
QUINN: So I actually got into Sam Raimi because of his Spider-Man movies—
STELLA: Booooo!
QUINN: (Laughs.) I know I know. I was just a kid. They were great superhero movies!
STELLA: They were.
QUINN: I just loved them as movies, I never really looked at them in a technical way. But once I did, I felt like this whole world opened up to me. Then I started watching other Sam Raimi movies, and seeing some of the same technical elements, and it was really cool. So I feel like you can absolutely love a Sam Raimi movie just as a movie, as a piece of entertainment, but you can also watch them much closer and just have a blast seeing all the things he does to make it so you can just watch it for entertainment. Does that make sense?
STELLA: Yeah. The best camerawork is camerawork that you don’t know is there. It pulls you into the story so you kind of forget you’re watching a movie.
QUINN: Exactly.
STELLA: But once you know what to look for, you can kind of analyze what he’s doing.
QUINN: Exactly!
—from a very secret work in progress