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CANNES — When it came to watching horror movies as a kid, Sam Raimi was a scaredy cat.
Raimi, who staked his reputation on the low-budget terror tale "The Evil Dead" and its two follow-ups, has taken a break from his blockbuster "Spider-Man" franchise to return to his horror roots with "Drag Me to Hell." He never liked fright flicks growing up, though.
In an interview at the Cannes Film Festival, where "Drag Me to Hell" played ahead of its theatrical release Friday, Raimi recalled seeing the 1972 thriller "The Others," about a good boy with an evil, undead twin.
"I started screaming in the theater, and my mother realized she had made a mistake to take me there," Raimi said. "I was ruining the theater for everybody. I was the worst horror movie audience, because I would be so vocal and too scared."
In college, though, Raimi, acting pal Bruce Campbell and producing partner Rob Tapert decided horror was the way to break into the business, since scary movies were the only low-budget films generally shown in theaters in the late 1970s.
Tapert, a producer on "Drag Me to Hell," took Raimi to see John Carpenter's "Halloween," then asked if he could make a horror movie as good as that.
"I said, `Uh, no, I definitely can't make a movie that good.' I had no idea how good these things were," Raimi said. "I didn't know that was the exceptionally good picture for horror. But then I kept watching drive-in movies to learn how they were put together, and I realized, I can make a movie as good as some of these, actually."
"The Evil Dead," starring Campbell among a group of friends who unleash an ancient force that zombifies them on a trip to the woods, was shot on a tiny $380,000 budget.
Its mix of gore, terror and laughs helped make it a cult classic. Raimi has maintained a similar blend of thrills and humor in such movies as "Darkman," "A Simple Plan" and "The Quick and the Dead."
The same is true of "Drag Me to Hell," starring Alison Lohman as a bank loan officer damned by a gypsy curse. During a close-quarters fight with the old crone who condemns her, Lohman's character suddenly finds herself being gummed on the chin by the hag, whose dentures have been knocked out.
"Sam has such a great imagination," Lohman said. "What he comes up with is just, it's very witty, but at the same time it's just off the wall. You come to work, and you have to be suckled by this woman's mouth on my chin. It's just so weird."
Raimi and his collaborators initially could not land a U.S. distributor to release "The Evil Dead." Success only came after they brought the movie to the sales market at the Cannes festival, where deals with French and British distributors led to a U.S. release.
For his return to Cannes, Raimi was part of the official program; "Drag Me to Hell" had a glitzy red-carpet premiere at the Palais, the festival headquarters. Raimi said he worried his little horror tale might besmirch the reputation of the world's most prestigious film fest.
"I just assumed they had a much fancier, higher caliber of pictures here. I'm a little disappointed," Raimi joked. "I just didn't know what kind of crowd there would be, if they would be slightly resentful that the committee that chose these pictures chose something like this to bring to the Palais, but apparently, their standards have lowered. No, I never saw such a great audience. A great audience that wanted to love cinema. So my fears were misplaced."
