Sam Raimi

Samuel M. Raimi (born October 23, 1959) is an American film director, screenwriter and producer.

He began to make Super 8 movies with his friend Bruce Campbell, whom he met in 1975.

In college, he teamed up with his brother's roommate Robert Tapert and Campbell to shoot Within the Woods (1978), a 32-minute horror film which raised $375,000, as well as his debut feature film It's Murder!.

During that time, he also shot the seven-minute short film Clockwork (1978), starring Scott Spiegel (who had appeared in Within the Woods) and Cheryl Guttridge.

He founded the production company Renaissance Pictures in 1979 and Ghost House Pictures in 2002.

Raimi has also produced several successful television series, including Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, its spin-off Xena: Warrior Princess and Ash vs Evil Dead starring long time friend and collaborator Bruce Campbell reprising his role in the Evil Dead franchise.

Raimi was born in Royal Oak, Michigan, to a Conservative Jewish family.

He is a son of merchants Celia Barbara (née Abrams) and Leonard Ronald Raimi.

His ancestors were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Hungary.

His younger brother Ted is an actor, and his older brother Ivan is a screenwriter and physician.

His older sister, Andrea Raimi Rubin, is a court reporter.

Another older brother, Sander, died at 15 in an accidental drowning in Israel; Raimi has said that the trauma knitted the remaining family closer together and "colored everything he's done for the rest of his life."

Raimi also mentioned that Sander first introduced him to Spider-Man, igniting his love for comics.

Raimi graduated from Groves High School and later went on to attend both Michigan State University and Università Bocconi, where he studied English but left after three semesters to film The Evil Dead.

Raimi became fascinated with making films when his father brought a movie camera home one day.

The Coens co-wrote Crimewave and The Hudsucker Proxy with Raimi in the mid-1980s (though Hudsucker was not produced for almost a decade).

Raimi made cameo appearances in Miller's Crossing, The Hudsucker Proxy, and with Joel Coen in Spies Like Us.

The Coen brothers gave Raimi advice on shooting in snow for A Simple Plan, based on their experiences with Fargo.

He worked in front of the camera in The Stand as a dimwitted hitman, John Carpenter's Body Bags as a murdered gas station attendant, and Indian Summer in what is perhaps his biggest role as a bumbling assistant to Alan Arkin.

The film was written by his childhood friend, writer-director Mike Binder, and shot at the camp that they both attended when they were younger.

Raimi also produced the entire English-language The Grudge franchise, based on the original Japanese films.

He is best known for directing the first three films in the Evil Dead franchise (1981–present) and the Spider-Man trilogy (2002–2007).

Through family, friends, and a network of investors, Raimi was able to finance production of the highly successful horror film The Evil Dead (1981) which became a cult hit and effectively launched Raimi's career.

He began work on his third film Crimewave (1985), which he co-wrote with the then-unknown Coen brothers, shortly after.

Intended as a live-action comic book, the film was unsuccessful, partly due to unwanted studio intervention.

Raimi then returned to the horror genre with the seminal Evil Dead II (which added slapstick humor to the over the top horror, showcasing his love of the Three Stooges).

With his brother Ivan Raimi (and crediting himself as Celia Abrams), Sam Raimi also wrote Easy Wheels (1989), which parodied the Outlaw biker film genre.

He also directed the superhero Darkman (1990), the revisionist western The Quick and the Dead (1995), the neo-noir crime-thriller A Simple Plan (1998), the supernatural thriller The Gift (2000), the supernatural horror Drag Me to Hell (2009), the Disney fantasy Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), and the Marvel Studios film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).

His films are known for their highly dynamic visual style, inspired by comic books and slapstick comedy.

A long-time comic book buff, he then attempted to adapt "The Shadow" into a movie, but was unable to secure the rights, so he created his own super-hero, Darkman (1990).

The film was his first major studio picture, and was commercially successful, spawning two sequels.

Through it he was still able to secure funding for Evil Dead III, which was retitled Army of Darkness and largely steered away from horror towards fantasy and comedy elements.

Army of Darkness, the final movie in the Evil Dead trilogy, commercially underperformed, yet on video became a cult classic.

In the 1990s, Raimi moved into other genres, directing such films as the western The Quick and the Dead (starring Sharon Stone and Gene Hackman), the critically acclaimed crime thriller A Simple Plan (1998) (starring Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton), and the romantic drama For Love of the Game (1999) (starring Kevin Costner).

Raimi achieved great critical and commercial success with the blockbuster Spider-Man (2002), which was adapted from the comic book series of the same name.

The movie grossed over US$800 million worldwide, spawning two sequels: Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3, both directed by Raimi and each grossing approximately $800 million.

After the completion of the third Spider-Man film, he planned on producing two more sequels (although Sony Pictures planned three sequels) but could not find a satisfactory script.

In 2022, reflecting on Spider-Man 3, Raimi told Rolling Stone: "It was a very painful experience for me. I wanted to make a Spider-Man movie to redeem myself for that. [The aborted] Spider-Man 4 — that was really what that was about. I wanted to go out on a high note. I didn't want to just make another one that pretty much worked. I had a really high standard in my mind. And I didn't think I could get that script to the level that I was hoping for by that start date."

He, along with Marc Webb, were both brought on as creative consultants for Marvel Studios' Spider-Man: No Way Home, directed by Jon Watts.

Raimi frequently collaborates with Joel and Ethan Coen, beginning when Joel was one of the editors of Evil Dead.