His work on the blockbuster Spider Man films mostly subsumed his innovative side, alas, and that's one reason Drag Me To Hell's got fans of his earlier work excited.
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The pictures established him as a gonzo horror maestro, but on entering Hollywood proper he applied his style to a number of different genres-the superhero movie ( Darkman), the "straight" thriller ( A Simple Plan) and even a baseball picture ( For Love of the Game). Not to mention cutting that screamed "Boo!" over and over again at breakneck speed. Raimi upped the ante with gore, even more pronounced creepy/funny sound effects than you found in an average Stooges short, and a hyper moving camera style. Raimi's most obvious antecedents/inspirations were, of course, the Three Stooges, whose eye-gouging, strangulating, head-smiting antics would have caused grave if not fatal injuries if performed in earnest and in real life.
Raimi's Evil Dead films, beginning in 1981 with the just regular Evil Dead, an ultra-low budget DIY landmark, conflated hysterical laughter with hysterical screaming by making explicit the always-present link between horror violence and slapstick. Which I will place, although perhaps not immediately, below the jump.
To get into this a bit will require the use, alas, of some substantive spoilers. In which case, a tricked-out number such as Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell, co-written by Raimi and his brother Ivan, will delight not just on the frenetic-fright level that Raimi set a certain bar for in his Evil Dead films of the '80s, but also for the ruthlessness with which it toys with viewer sympathies. At what point does gleeful cynicism become so gleeful that it ceases to function as cynicism at all, and mutates into a blatant formalist trope of little emotional or intellectual resonance, but plenty of aesthetic.what's the word? Bliss? Is frisson somehow appropriate here? I guess it would all depend, largely, on how you feel about horror movies in the first place.