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Getting Stephen King’s name onto the poster for The Evil Dead took one word, and the word was “Yep.” Bruce Campbell laid out the mechanics on Chris Jericho’s Talk Is Jericho podcast: King had already raved about the film in print, and nobody who made it knew how to reach him to ask whether they could print it back.
“So I don’t even know how we found him. Maybe through his book company,” Campbell said. “We’re like, ‘Can we use that quote?’ And he goes, ‘Yep.’”
“So it’s on the poster and the box and the video,” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, how fast was that change in perception?’” Then, in case anyone missed the debt: “So thank you, Dr. King.”
King Saw It at Cannes in 1982
Sam Raimi shot The Evil Dead on 16mm in a cabin outside Morristown, Tennessee, for $375,000. It had a private premiere at Detroit’s Redford Theatre in October 1981 and then stalled: foreign buyers were interested, American distributors were not. The veteran horror salesman Irvin Shapiro, who had also talked Raimi out of calling it Book of the Dead, kept pushing it, and King caught it at Cannes in 1982. He wrote it up in Twilight Zone magazine as “the most ferociously original horror film of the year.” New Line Cinema took the American rights and sent it wide on April 15, 1983.
King Came Back for the Sequel
He did it twice. When Evil Dead II could not find money, a crew member who had worked on its pre-production turned up on the North Carolina set of King’s own Maximum Overdrive, and word got back. “He calls Dino De Laurentiis and goes, ‘You should make this movie,’” Campbell told Consequence in 2018. “We met with Dino and I think we had a deal in about half an hour.” What sold De Laurentiis was the first film’s foreign take, which in Campbell’s telling was the one market the producer actually read: “Some producers know America. This guy knew everything but America.”
$375,000 Against $29.4 Million
The first film closed at $2.4 million domestic and roughly $29.4 million worldwide, a return large enough to start a franchise, which it did. Forty-five years later the series is still shipping: Evil Dead Burn arrived on HBO Max on October 2.
King has spent four decades as the genre’s most quotable patron, and the going rate, at least once, was a single syllable. Campbell is still saying thank you for it.