Sam Raimi Interview: On ‘The Evil Dead’ Cabin Robbery – “I had to stay there to guard our stuff!” [Exclusive]
Pat Jankiewicz
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At 40, The Evil Dead has become respectable. It’s spawned sequels, remakes, ripoffs, a porn parody, and even a stage musical. There’s been video games, action figures, comic books, t-shirts, Halloween costumes, CDs, and even a TV series, and it shows no signs of stopping. In fact, Evil Dead Rise, the fifth film in the long-running franchise, just set a record as the highest-grossing Evil Dead film theatrically ($146,733,054 worldwide).
Director Sam Raimi went on to direct Marvel Cinematic epics and major Hollywood movies, starring Keanu Reeves, Liam Neeson, James Franco, and Kevin Costner. The Michigan native is quite aware it all began with his tiny, gory $375,000 horror movie, made in the woods with a cast of unknowns.
From Humble Beginnings
“I was 19 when I started shooting The Evil Dead,” he recalls. “I turned 20 during filming. Making it was a really tough job.”The Evil Dead star Bruce Campbell once described the 12-week shoot as “A mirthless exercise in agony”.
“Before we made it, Bruce and I met at Groves High School in Southfield, Michigan, when I was 15 and he was 16,” Raimi notes.
“Rob Tapert and I began making movies together at Michigan State University. We formed a filmmaking Society just as a student organization, so we could rent rooms and show our pictures.
“Bruce, Rob, and I all decided to drop out and make The Evil Dead and raise the money for it…At least that was our plan!”
When the trio began the film, “Bruce was a janitor, Rob was a cab driver and I was a busboy—a very good bus boy too, I might add—at the Midtown Cafe in Birmingham Michigan!
“I left the job to make The Evil Dead! I just put down a plate of rolls and picked up a megaphone,” he jokes.
Morristown: The Coldest Place On Earth (Or Tennessee)
While fast-moving and fun to watch, “The Evil Dead was physically very difficult to make,” said Raimi, “Because, we were in Tennessee.” But that wasn’t the hard part.
“The cabin we filmed at was, way out in Morristown, Tennessee, in the winter and we had a non-heated place,” he said. “The cabin was not heated at all. And it got down to about zero, or in the low teens. It was just so cold being there for 16 to 18 hours a day, with no heat around these temperatures,” Raimi said with an involuntary shudder.
“It started to wear you out after a while and one of us—usually me—would have to sleep at the cabin out there at night, to protect our equipment. Because the cabin was so isolated, you could easily get ripped off,” he explained. “In fact, we actually DID get ripped off once! They stole some lights and power tools, so I had to stay there to guard our stuff!”
What Do The Evil Dead and Hot Coffee Have In Common?
Those kinds of conditions aren’t optimal for good sleep. “Basically, when you work there in 20° weather all day, and then you sleep there all night, it really, really wears your body down,” he sighs. “You’re always cold and tired because you’re just trying to stay warm.”
The director remembers, “After a while, you just get this chill in your bones that you just can’t get out. You’re terminally cold, forever cold, so that was really hard, just working in the cold.”
So how exactly did they keep warm? “Our cabin had no running water, so when your hands are so cold, what do you do? The cabin had electricity and we had a hot coffee maker…So in the morning, you can pour hot coffee on your hands, which is what I did!” said Raimi. “That would warm them up and then I could operate the camera properly!”
Long before he was making $200 million dollar movies with Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, “I was just trying to stay warm and make sure everything was ready to go every morning.”
The Coen Brothers-Evil Dead Connection
Reportedly, The Coen Brothers helped with the first Evil Dead film.
“The Coens were involved,” he confirms.
“Joel Coen was the assistant editor on The Evil Dead, and did some of the cutting on it. He did a very good job, with Edna Ruth Paul, who was the official editor of the film.
“Ethan actually wrote a few lines for the Professor’s dialogue on the tape recorder on the first Evil Dead,” Raimi reveals. “I was in post-production and I said, ‘Ethan, come up with something snappy for this guy to say’ and he did!”
Truly Grueling Terror
The end credits of his first film proudly proclaim it as ‘The Ultimate Experience in Grueling Terror!’
“Yes,” he laughs, “in the tail end of the credits in the first film, in our bold youth, we wrote ‘The Evil Dead, the Ultimate Experience in grueling terror!’, with the copyright.”
So what did they do for the sequel? “When we did Evil Dead II, for the sequel, we had to say ‘The sequel to The Ultimate Experience in Grueling Terror!’ because that was what we boldly claimed in our youth the first one was.”
The Evil Dead‘s end credits also say it was filmed “in Morristown, Tennessee and Detroit, U.S.A.”. “The reason we said ‘Detroit U.S.A.’ was because it always burned us back in Detroit, when we would watch movies and they would say ‘filmed in Hollywood, U.S.A,’ said Raimi.
“It was like, ‘What, you don’t live in a state anymore?!? I don’t care how big you guys think you are, you still live in California! It’s Hollywood, California for God’s sake, but they never said that! So, I said ‘All right, it was filmed in Detroit, U.S.A.!'”
Categorized:Interviews
