Sam Raimi Looks Back on Stephen King’s Early Support For THE EVIL DEAD and Helping Laucnh His Career

There’s a genuinely cool footnote in horror history that links Stephen King and Sam Raimi, and it goes way beyond shared genre DNA. Raimi has never directed a King adaptation, yet he’s appeared onscreen in two of them, 1994’s The Stand and 1997’s The Shining. But, the real connection between these two icons runs much deeper and, according to Raimi, helped change his life.

With Raimi’s new survival thriller Send Help arriving in theaters this week, the director has been reflecting on the moments that shaped his career. In a recent interview with CinemaBlend, Raimi talked openly about how King’s early support helped get The Evil Dead off the ground at a time when nobody else wanted anything to do with it.

King has spent decades using his success to spotlight other creators. Long before social media turned recommendations into daily noise, his praise carried serious weight.

He has backed books, films, and shows simply because he liked them, and that generosity has quietly altered careers along the way. Raimi’s story is one of the clearest examples.

While Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and Rob Tapert were still students at Michigan State University, they scraped together enough money to make The Evil Dead. Today it’s a cornerstone of horror cinema. Back then, it was seen as a risky oddball that distributors wanted to avoid. Raimi recalled just how rough the Cannes Film Market was when they tried to sell it:

“[Stephen King] gave me my chance in the business. When when Evil Dead was trying to be sold as a, you know, a 16 millimeter blow up in the Cannes Film Market – not the festival, but the market is the shady dealings going on underneath the prestigious film festival, where buyers from Spain or Italy will buy an inexpensive American film and the the marketers knows, ‘Oh, Italy will have 200 theaters will play this kind of film.’ And they know it's worth, and they make deals. They sell it. Well, nobody would touch Evil Dead with a ten foot plague pole.”

At the time, extreme horror wasn’t exactly welcome. What now feels tame compared to modern splatter hits was considered way too much in the early 1980s. Distributors were nervous, skeptical, and uninterested. What the film needed was a respected voice willing to say this thing mattered.

That voice came from Stephen King.

By 1982, King was already a literary juggernaut with Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, Firestarter, and Cujo under his belt. He happened to be at Cannes, sat in on a screening of The Evil Dead, and was blown away. Raimi remembered:

“And then Stephen King happened to be in the theater in Cannes, the market. He saw it, and he gave us a great review in Twilight Zone magazine. And I was so honored because he was my giantest, largest hero, still is. He's a tremendous influence.”

King’s review in Twilight Zone Magazine became a turning point. He famously wrote, “That [Sam Raimi] is a genius is yet unproven; that he has made the most ferociously original horror film of 1982 seems to me beyond doubt.”

That endorsement grabbed attention, sparked critical interest, helped the film find distribution overseas, and eventually led to New Line Cinema picking it up in the U.S.

Decades later, Raimi is still quick to acknowledge that moment. Without King stepping in when he did, The Evil Dead might’ve been buried under bad timing and industry fear. Instead, it helped launch one of the most distinctive careers in modern genre filmmaking.