Doctor Strange director Sam Raimi on horror tricks, Evil Dead eyeballs and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man

Sam Raimi, the director behind classics including Evil Dead, reveals how he used all his spooky skills for the Doctor Strange sequel.

When scare-master Sam Raimi came on board at late notice to direct Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Elizabeth Olsen didn’t have to do any horror homework – she’d already done it.

“I was already familiar with Sam’s work,” she says of the man behind spooky classics including Evil Dead (and its sequels) and Drag Me To Hell.

“I used to love horror films when I was a little kid. I was probably eight years old and one of my friend’s parents had an entire closet of lots of movies we probably shouldn’t have watched, and most of those were horror films because I loved the feeling of being scared.”

Benedict Cumberbatch’s second stand-alone movie as the master of the mystic arts dives deeper into the horror genre than any of its 27 predecessors in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as Doctor Strange bounces around parallel realities, meeting alternative versions of himself and trying to protect a fledgling superhero whose powers are coveted by a powerful magician.

Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen and Sam Raimi at the Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness photo call in Berlin, Germany. Picture: Getty Images

Raimi, the man behind the trailblazing Tobey Maguire trilogy of Spider-Man movies and long-time friend of Marvel head honcho Kevin Fiege, took the helm for Multiverse of Madness after original director Scott Derrickson left due to the dreaded “creative differences”.

He dug deep into his bag of horror tricks in trying to walk the line between a family-friendly superhero movie that slots into the established MCU and a story that involved witches, demons, zombies, monsters and other things that go bump in the night.

“It did help a lot,” Raimi says of his horror background.

“While it’s not literally a horror film, it does have elements of scariness and spookiness in a fun way, and making Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, Army Of Darkness and Drag Me To Hell taught me how to build suspense sequences, keep the audience on edge, tease the audience that something is coming and then not give it to them … and then give it to them.

“They taught me how to deliver a scare and the basics of the horror movie so they were really helpful tools for me to apply to this film.”

One of the early action sequences in Multiverse of Madness sees Strange battling a giant squid-like cyclops creature from another dimension – and ends with said creature losing his giant eyeball.

Raimi’s breakout hit, the 1987 horror-comedy Evil Dead 2, also infamously featured a scene featuring a flying eyeball, but the director laughs at the suggestion that the new scene is a homage to his earlier film.

Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff in Doctor Strange in the Multivers of Madness.

“Not consciously,” he chuckles.

“But when you have a one-eyed, gigantic octopus … really that’s how he’s going to go down. That eye is coming out, there is really no other option.

“But I am the same filmmaker who made the movies that I made and I have a point of view on things, so it will seem similar to the point of view I have had on other films.”

The Multiverse Of Madness is a continuation of the concept started in WandaVision and developed in last year’s monster hit Spider-Man: No Way Home, which also featured Cumberbatch’s Strange and brought back previous iterations of the web-slinging superhero, including Maguire and Andrew Garfield.

Raimi says he chatted to his fellow Spider-Man director Jon Watts about how the two films tied together and found him to be “wonderfully charming”.

Raimi says he was as thrilled as the fans who geeked out in cinemas to see the three Spider-Men together – as well as the some of the villains from his films – with an added personal dimension adding to his excitement.

“I felt the same thing as the audience, like ‘oh my gosh, they are back – how cool!’,” he says. “And yet I had a personal element added to it also, which is that Tobey is a friend of mine, and so are Willem Defoe and Alfred Molina, and to see them back together the way we all were was just like being embraced in a wonderful way with the warmth of your friends.”

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is in cinemas now.

Originally published as Doctor Strange director Sam Raimi on horror tricks, Evil Dead eyeballs and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man