With Send Help in cinemas now, we’re looking at Sam Raimi’s biggest contribution to the superhero genre. No, it wasn’t Spider-Man. You’ve stumbled across the Film Stories Newsletter! To get this sort of thing in your inbox every Friday, subscribe here. Hello! We’ve been writing SOS in the sand all week, and 20th Century Studios finally ... Super-noir | How Sam Raimi defined a new genre
With Send Help in cinemas now, we’re looking at Sam Raimi’s biggest contribution to the superhero genre. No, it wasn’t Spider-Man.
You’ve stumbled across the Film Stories Newsletter! To get this sort of thing in your inbox every Friday, subscribe here.
Hello!
We’ve been writing SOS in the sand all week, and 20th Century Studios finally Sent Out Sam. Raimi. His new film, anyway. It’s a miracle they deciphered all that, to be honest. Check out Simon’s interview with the director, our celebration of the super-noir genre he helped create, and our review of Send Help below.
PLUS: Support indie print mags! Get the latest issue of Film Stories magazine, featuring boxing drama Giant on the cover – and a bunch of big and indie mischief within.
TELL ME THE NEWS IN FIVE(ISH) LINES
???? Send Help! We’re stuck on an island with the new Sam Raimi film! Check out our review.
???? Xfinity’s Jurassic Park ad made us physically ill – who should we send the bag to?
???? Can filmmakers buying cinemas save moviegoing? Kristen Stewart says so.
???? F1: The Movie is getting a sequel. We’re trying really hard not to call it F2.
???? Disney+ is getting an AI slop generator. Yay?
The superhero genre of the 2020s doesn’t attract many auteurs. But then, most auteurs are not like Sam Raimi.
Raised on a diet of The Three Stooges and comic books, the director famously made his video nasty breakthrough – The Evil Dead – as a horror more out of financial necessity than a particular fondness for the genre. Scares are cheap to make, and scares sell. Hence The Evil Dead II (and the later medieval romp Army Of Darkness), ostensibly horror films but packed with more goo and Looney Tunes-level slapstick than jump scares. From the beginning, Raimi was a filmmaker with a strong sense of personal taste and style – but ruthlessly capable of running towards the commercial.
Suggested product
Issue #59 (Handmade Special): Magazine, 'Bulk' 4K UHD Blu-Ray + Ben Wheatley Signed Zine
£39.99
What Raimi really wanted to make, as hilariously unpopular as the idea was at the time, was a superhero movie. After unsuccessfully seeking out the rights for Batman and pulp 1930s magazine character The Shadow, he settled for making up his own noir-ish vigilante in the form of 1990’s Darkman.
Now widely considered a cult classic, the tale of a scientist (Liam Neeson) using his synthetic skin and a resistance to pain to punish the mob who left him for dead is curiously emblematic of a film genre going through its Dark Knight Returns era. The popularity of Frank Miller’s 1986 comic miniseries not only piqued Tim Burton’s interest enough to tackle 1989’s Batman, but almost certainly persuaded Universal execs to greenlight Raimi’s strange and grisly original story in 1987.
The two films’ releases just over a year apart proved the super-noir genre had legs at two very different budget levels. Despite their more-or-less parallel production, their similarities are more than tone-deep. Danny Elfman’s musical talents took over from John Williams’ Superman theme to define the sound of the modern superhero movie right up to his and Raimi’s reunion for Spider-Man in the next millennium. Both point their camera in noir-typical style, and both teach kids about the dangers of exposing skin to unidentified liquids.
Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing, Alex Proyas’ The Crow and Burton’s Batman follow-up soon followed, demonstrating the effectiveness of the “let these genre filmmakers cook” strategy. Today, these grungy takes on the spandex-swathed mythos have turned the tone most commonly credited to one of the era’s most-profitable blockbusters into de-facto examples of post-video nasty pulp.
As the only completely original hero of all the above, Darkman is the rare example of a superhero uniquely designed for the big screen. As such, it takes influences not just from the Dark Age of comic books and 30s magazine serials, but from The Hunchback Of Notre Dame and The Phantom Of The Opera. And despite its tonal similarities to Burton’s Batman, it serves as a calling card for the authorial take on the superhero genre that would define the comic book movie output of the next five years. Say what you like about Swamp Thing – a studio exec wouldn’t have made it look like that.
These were films made, frankly, by nerds and weirdos (the only people who should be allowed to make films, in my mind – Ed), and as such there’s a dogged commitment to individuality missing from their more four-quadrant descendants. Darkman, in hindsight, is unmistakably a Sam Raimi film – not just from its fondness for practical gross-out effects, but in the almost operatic evilness of a mob cackling as they trash a poor scientist’s lab. That this authorial vision somehow turned into a sort-of short-lived template for pulp video flicks is sort of an accident.
Thirty six (36!) years on, the same ability for auteur directors to put their stamp on the genre has faded away. The intervening years have seen Raimi slightly dilute his VHS-stylings once, for his Spider-Man trilogy, and dilute them again for Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness in 2022. After dabbling with obvious auteurship in the films of James Gunn and Zack Snyder, studio hero movies have broadly retreated into comfortable house styles. Departures from the norm (Joker: Folie à Deux and, in a very different way, Madame Web) have been broadly rejected by audiences.
Read more: Glasgow Film Festival | New programme head talks honouring audiences – and Robert Redford
Not that there hasn’t been a degree of interest in the return of the Marvel blockbuster’s scrappier older cousin. Reboots of The Crow and the pre-Dark Knight Returns comedy The Toxic Avenger have looked to these same stories in attempts to artificially create cult output of their own. Gunn’s own DC Universe has pitched itself as a safe space for individually stylised films, with this year’s Clayface (from screenwriter Mike Flanagan) and an upcoming Swamp Thing reboot (developed by James Mangold) promising a move away from the median. The old Warner Bros guard’s The Batman is perhaps the most recent example of a major superhero film going all-in on a distinctive style – itself taking cues from the 1996-7 comic series, The Long Halloween.
But though the IP which defined the superhero genre of the 1990s can be resurrected, the conditions which made it possible are more difficult to reanimate. What was once fringe and nerdy is now the very definition of the mainstream – milked into every form you can imagine from parody (Deadpool, The Boys) to horror (Brightburn, The New Mutants). All that’s left to do now is to mine its own output for inspiration, like a large-language model harvesting its own farts.
Raimi himself has thrown his hat into the ring with attempts to get a Darkman 2 off the block (not to be confused with 1995’s straight-to-video Darkman II: The Return Of Durant) with him as producer. Even then, the Evil Dead maestro doesn’t seem interested in hopping behind the camera himself. In 1990, Raimi helped define the superhero genre; in 2026, it’s moved past him – and it’s all the less weird for it.
Send Help is in cinemas now
