This marks his first horror movie since 2009’s Drag Me to Hell.
Filmmaker Sam Raimi got his start in the world of horror, and while genre fans will always think of him as a horror filmmaker first and foremost, he would go on to helm massive blockbusters, such as a trilogy of Spider-Man movies starring Tobey Maguire and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. News comes from Deadline today that Raimi has been tapped to direct the horror movie Send Help, which marks his first time directing a horror movie since Drag Me to Hell in 2009. While Raimi has produced horror movies and directed horror TV shows in the last 15 years, this marks his first return to feature-length horror directing in more than a decade.
Deadline describes of the new movie, “According to our sources, the film is described as a two-hander horror thriller set on an island. The story is said to fall somewhere between Rob Reiner’s Stephen King adaptation Misery and Robert Zemeckis’ classic Castaway.”
Send Help was written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, who wrote 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason and the 2009 Friday the 13th reboot.
The movie that helped put Raimi on the map was The Evil Dead, which earned a positive endorsement from horror writer Stephen King. Raimi earned enough support from the picture to develop Evil Dead II, which served both as a reboot of the original experience as well as an expansion on the ideas, with he and star Bruce Campbell ultimately concluding the trilogy with Army of Darkness.
Raimi offered up audiences a variety of experiences in the ’90s with projects like Darkman, The Quick and the Dead, and The Gift, before entering the world of Marvel with 2002’s Spider-Man. DC projects like Superman and Batman dominated the big screen for years, though 2000’s X-Men marked a turning point for the Marvel universe. While that movie was a modest hit that generated excitement in other Marvel characters, Raimi’s Spider-Man was a massive blockbuster, as were the next two films in the trilogy.
The success of Spider-Man also resulted in a variety of other Marvel figures jumping to the big screen, though Daredevil, Fantastic Four, and Ghost Rider all failed to live up to the critical success of Raimi’s films. By the late 2000s, Marvel Studios launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which brought to life characters who weren’t owned by Sony or Fox.
While Raimi returned to his horror roots with Drag Me to Hell and also developed the Evil Dead sequel series Ash vs. Evil Dead, he had the full-circle moment of returning to the world of Marvel 20 years after he helped pave the way for the Marvel renaissance when he directed the Doctor Strange sequel in 2022.
Stay tuned for updates on Send Help.
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