Stephen King Helped Kickstart A Legendary Horror Director's Career With One Review

The video store era was a glorious time for cinephiles, especially if you were fortunate enough to live in a city/town/hamlet with a well-stocked, carefully curated selection of VHS tapes and LaserDiscs. You could blow an hour or two perusing the shelves, and there wasn't an area of the store stuffed with more tantalizingly lurid delights than the horror section.

The VHS covers for horror movies went hard. They sold scares, gore, and more than a little flesh. They had to. The vast majority of these films received limited theatrical releases (at best), and scant marketing support. The cover art did all the heavy lifting, and, unlike prestige dramas, there was rarely a pull-quote from a major film critic to sell you on the artistic quality of, say, "The Corpse Grinders."

Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead" stood apart. The striking cover image features a scarcely-dressed woman desperately reaching for the sky as a mangled hand grasps her by the neck and appears ready to drag her into the soil. The three video box unities are thus satisfied: scary, gory, and fleshy. But "The Evil Dead" could've been just another "Don't Go in the Woods" were it not for the impressive pull-quote splashed across the art. When Stephen King praises a horror movie he had nothing to do with, attention must be paid.

Shot for a meager $375,000, "The Evil Dead" was a brutal trial by fire for filmmaker Sam Raimi, as well as his cast. When the film was completed, it was whisked off to the Cannes Film Market where, Raimi hoped, foreign distributors would snap up the rights and reward his collaborators for the hard, underpaid work. But, as Raimi recalled in a 2026 interview with CinemaBlend, "Nobody would touch Evil Dead with a ten foot plague pole."

You'd like to think that a horror movie as exhilaratingly original as "The Evil Dead" would've found its way eventually, but the genre was red-hot at the time. Furthermore, distributors had a near single-minded obsession with slasher flicks in the 1980s (which wound up hobbling the genre the the 1990s), and "The Evil Dead" didn't quite check that box. Someone had to step up and praise the violent, vertiginous cinematic virtues of "The Evil Dead," and that person, to Raimi's surprise, was Stephen King.

Per Raimi, "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." That King pull-quote adorning the Thorn EMI VHS release of "The Evil Dead" read simply: "The most ferociously original horror film of the year."

That quote landed "The Evil Dead" in just about every U.S. video store, and, most importantly, wasn't false praise. When you see a possessed woman go nutzoid, jab a lead pencil into a person's ankle, and dig around in there with vicious, gleeful abandon, you know you're in the hands of a true, talented madman. Add in the stylized Dutch angles and lack of coverage, and there was no doubt Raimi had the goods. "Evil Dead II" proved he was a titan of the horror industry.

Interestingly, Raimi has never made a film adaptation of a King story, but I can't think of a single novel the maestro has written that would align with the filmmaker's sensibilities. Maybe "Misery?" Actually, I think Raimi scratched his King itch with his take on Scott Smith's blood-curdling thriller "A Simple Plan" (which, in novel form, boasted a pull-quote from King). They're both masters of the macabre, but they're not necessarily ideal dance partners.