How Sam Raimi’s Send Help Defies The Desert Island Thriller
The director is keen to subvert expectations in the horror genre — and, hopefully, with a new superhero movie.
Sam Raimi is the last person on Earth who you’d expect to be squeamish. The director of such delirious horror stories as The Evil Dead and Drag Me to Hell has spent years honing his own brand of horror-comedy — but Raimi tells Inverse that the genre still makes him sweat.
“I still can’t take them,” he admits with a shy smile. “I’m a very weak subject for them... I’m like the coward kid that likes to scare others, but is actually terrified himself.”
You’d never think it to look at his filmography — especially his latest film, Send Help, which rings like a true return to the genre and tone that fans know and love Raimi for. The director reteams with Doctor Strange’s Rachel McAdams for a riff on a classic premise: What if you were stranded on a deserted island with the worst person ever? McAdams is Linda Liddle, the mousy employee who was the butt of every joke at a glossy Fortune 500 company. On an uncharted island in the Gulf of Thailand, however, her expert survival skills make her indispensable to Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), the boss who previously had plans to fire her outright.
Raimi and his team worked hard to set Send Help apart from other desert island thrillers.
Send Help quickly hones in on the kind of reversal of fortune that plenty of similar films have already made their own. Raimi was well aware of any potential points of comparison: When he first read the pitch for the film, written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, it cited Misery and Cast Away directly.
“I love both movies. They’re both obviously classics and brilliant,” Raimi says. “But I made it a point to not only not watch them again, but when I recognized similarities, to try and take the other path. I didn’t really like working that way, but they’re such great classics that I had no choice.”
Raimi’s art department took a slightly different approach, particularly when it came to filming the plane crash that delivers Linda and Bradley to their island purgatory. “We all watched every plane crash scene imaginable,” says Zainab Azizi, Raimi’s long-time producer. “It was terrifying, [but] we wanted to make sure ours was very unique and different.”
Send Help is a return to the gore Raimi’s best known for, but he “still can’t take” that kind of horror movie.
Whatever the technique, Raimi’s trademark touch is inescapable. Send Help feels like a fresh take on an old standard by virtue of his involvement. It’s great to see the director back in his element, as squeamish as he may be behind the camera — but fans are also wondering if Raimi has his sights on another familiar genre: the superhero movie. Raimi delivered one of the most beloved superhero trilogies of all time with the Spider-Man films, and seems eager to explore more of the genre after 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Rather than returning to Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, though, Raimi seems more curious about Marvel’s fiercest competition.
“I think that many of those DC characters are brilliant, same with the Marvel characters,” Raimi reveals. “I think any story that they had, which had a real character story — something I could understand, the progression, the transformation, the movement of the hero and the villain — I’d love to do. It’s really as general as that. If I had a well-written character story, I think you could make a really good movie.”
Raimi’s interest in DC makes a lot of sense, as he once attempted to helm his own Batman film. With the DC Universe under new management, and at least two different Batman projects in the works, chances of Raimi taking on the character are low. Still, any Raimi-directed DC film would be fascinating: If Send Help proves anything, it’s that the world needs more from the filmmaker.
