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Sam Raimi
Biography:
 Samuel Marshall Raimi was born in Royal Oak, Michigan on October 23rd, 1959. His youth was filled with a blissful combination of television, comic books, and baseball. In his early teens Raimi developed a fascination with his family’s home video camera and it wasn’t long before he had saved up enough money to buy his own. Along with his older brother Ivan, his younger brother Ted, and neighborhood friends like Josh Becker, Scott Spiegel, and Bruce Campbell, Raimi would produce dozens of backyard films throughout his middle and high school years.
With titles like “Shemp Eats the Moon” and “Three Pests in a Mess”, the majority of these early efforts were similar in tone and theme to his beloved comedy team, The Three Stooges. Raimi graduated from Wiley E. Groves High School in 1977 and promptly shipped off to Michigan State University where he and Ivan would start the campus “Creative Filmmaking Society”. They would find their first success with “The Happy Valley Kid” which starred Ivan’s roommate, a business major named Robert G. Tapert. After reuniting with Campbell, the group produced their first feature length project, It’s Murder! Though less successful on the financial end, It’s Murder! got Raimi and company seriously considering an attempt at professional filmmaking. That attempt would come in the form of The Evil Dead.
Horror was not a genre that the troop was familiar with, so they practiced with two short films; “Clockwork” and “Within the Woods”. When they finally felt ready, they raised the capital and headed down to Morristown, Tennessee to shoot their picture. After a grueling shoot and a lengthy post-production, the film was picked up by the fledgling distribution company New Line Cinema.
The Evil Dead became a major hit and Raimi was quickly hard at work with his first studio picture, the failure known as Crimewave. After Crimewave limped quietly in and out of theaters, Raimi returned to the woods for a sequel to The Evil Dead. With the financial support of Italian mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis, Evil Dead II was a genre-bending spectacular that brought Raimi attention from around the world. His next picture would be the special effects driven Darkman, which would be followed by the third Evil Dead film, Army of Darkness. Raimi was now a Hollywood player, a fact that would be confirmed with big budget films like The Quick and the Dead and For Love of the Game.
After a short break producing television shows like “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys”, “Xena: Warrior Princess”, and “American Gothic” with his business partner Rob Tapert, Raimi would tackle the largest film of his career… a big screen adaptation of the comic book Spider-Man. Spider-Man’s unprecedented success led to a sequel, Spider-Man 2, which was equally well received. In the early part of the new millennium Raimi expanded his empire by co-founding Ghost House Pictures, a production company focused on bringing low budget horror movies to theaters. With successes like The Grudge, The Grudge 2, and Boogeyman, Raimi’s significance and influence in the filmmaking industry seems virtually limitless.
Films:
It’s Murder! (1978)
The Evil Dead (1982)
Crimewave (1985)
The Evil Dead II (1987)
Easy Wheels (1989)
Darkman (1990)
The Nutt House (1992)
Army of Darkness (1993)
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
The Quick and the Dead (1995)
A Simple Plan (1998)
For Love of the Game (1999)
The Gift (2000)
Spider-Man (2002)
Spider-Man 2 (2004)
The Grudge(2005)
Boogeyman (2005)
Man with the Screaming Brain (2005)
The Grudge 2 (2006)
The Messengers (2007)
Spider-Man 3 (2007)
30 Days of Night (2007)
Boogeyman 2 (2007)
Drag Me to Hell (2009)
Upcoming Projects:
Armored (2009)
Jack the Giant Killer (2009)
“Legend of the Seeker” (series 2009)
“Spartacus: Blood and Sand” (series 2010)
Priest (2010)
Dibbuk Box (2010)
The Evil Dead (2010)
Spider-Man 4 (2011)
Other Feature Film Credits:
The Dead Next Door (1988) (executive producer)
Lunatics: A Love Story (1991) (executive producer)
Inside Out IV (1992) (camera operator for the segment “Motivation”)
Hard Target (1993) (executive producer)
Timecop (1994) (executive producer)
Darkman II: The Return of Durant (1994) (executive producer)
Darkman III: Die Darkman Die (1996) (executive producer)
Rise (2007) (executive producer)
Messengers 2: The Scarecrow (2009) (executive producer)
Short Films:
“The Happy Valley Kid” (1978) (director)
“Clockwork” (1979) (writer and director)
“Within the Woods” (1979) (writer, director, and executive producer)
Music Video Projects:
none
Television Projects:
M.A.N.T.I.S. (1994) (writer and executive producer)
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (series 1995-1999) (executive producer)
Xena: Warrior Princess (series 1995-2001) (executive producer)
American Gothic (series 1995-1996) (executive producer)
Spy Game (series 1997) (executive producer)
Young Hercules (series 1997-1999) (executive producer)
Hercules & Xena The Animated Movie: The Battle for Mount Olympus (1998) (executive producer)
Jack of All Trades (series 2000) (executive producer)
Cleopatra 2525 (series 2000-2001) (executive producer)
13: Fear is Real (series 2009) (executive producer)
Non Film Projects:
Supervising producer on the PC, PlayStation2, and Xbox game “Evil Dead: Regeneration”. This is the third video game spawned from the Evil Dead franchise; its predecessors being “Evil Dead: Hail to the King” and “Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick”.
Production and Other Companies:
Renaissance Pictures
Ghost House Pictures
Film Award Ratios (wins/nominations):
Academy Awards – 1/7 (14.3%)
Golden Globes – 0/1 (0.0%)
Sundance Film Festival – 0/0 (0.0%)
Cannes Film Festival – 0/1 (0.0%)
Writers Guild of America – 0/1 (0.0%)
Directors Guild of America – 0/0 (0.0%)
AFI Top One Hundred Films of All Time – 0
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