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 postproduction, 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 megaproducer Dino De Laurentiis, Evil Dead II was a genrebending 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.

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