You've seen Evil Dead and Evil Dead II—at least, you should have—and now, if you're a true Fangorian, you have the name of director/co-writer Sam Raimi carved into your black little heart. You just know this guy is a true horror freak, right? He must know every slice that Freddy's razored fingers have slashed, he must know every drop of blood that fell from Christopher Lee's fangs, he's seen everything Boris Karloff ever made. Right?

Wrong. Until he made Evil Dead, Sam Raimi—brace yourself—did not like horror movies. "Horror films scared me," says Raimi, "and I didn't like being scared. It was an unpleasant experience for me. But since making my first horror film, I've come to appreciate them, and to appreciate the great artistry of the classics."

He made a horror movie because he wanted to get established, to make a name for himself, and he realized horror movies were a relatively quick way in. He's really more inclined towards comedies. "The greatest thrill for me," Raimi admits, "is to be in the audience when they laugh. A step down from that is to make them cry, and a step down from that is to make them scream. So I'm trying to work my way up to laughing."

Actually, his interviewer pointed out, Raimi started with a film where the audience threw up. "I can't deny it," Raimi concurs, shaking his head in mock contrition, "You're right." What happened, of course, is that Raimi made two terrific horror movies.

He's only directed three actual features so far (though he made a few others while he was at college), but it's not too soon to say that Sam Raimi has a distinctive, even aggressive style. He comes at you, whistles blowing, gongs ringing and rockets going off. His movies are in your face, and they're impossible not to watch. He has a breathtaking, loopy style, similar only to that of his close friends Joel & Ethan Coen, renowned for their amazing Raising Arizona and Blood Simple.

For his new movie, Darkman, Raimi feels he's toned down his style. "This is a much more restrained picture, visually." Raimi allows, "because the goal of this picture was to get into the characters' heads and follow them as real human beings in extraordinary circumstances. I didn't want the audience saying, 'Boy, what cool shot!' I didn't want them noticing the camera. I just wanted them to say 'What a poor sap he is! How's he going to get out of this one?'"

What the poor sap gets into is a hell of a mess. Liam Neeson plays the title role of Peyton Westlake, an artificial skin researcher who is tortured, set afire and blown through the roof of his lab. Believed dead, he uses his replacement skin (which only lasts for 99 minutes or so before it starts to disintegrate) to get revenge on those who attacked him—by impersonating them, one by one, and sowing distrust like Johnny Appleseed planted apples.

However, cautions Raimi, "Darkman is not really a horror picture. It's the story of a man who's put into a terrible situation, who tries to do the best he can to get himself out of that situation. It's more of a tragedy than anything else. Sure, he looks terrible, he looks hideous, he's an ugly son of a bitch. But really, what the movie turns out to be is the story of a man trying to recapture his lost love."

The actress portraying the lost love is Oscar nominee (for Mississippi Burning) Frances McDormand, a longtime friend of Raimi's. "I knew she was a woman with a lot of soul," Raimi notes. "I counted on her to bring that soul to the picture, and she did, she really did. She makes me care about her on film, and makes me worry about what will happen next to her, whether she'll be reunited with the man she loves."

Most people who direct old friends act as if the movie was something on the order of a class reunion. Not Raimi. Directing McDormand was "very difficult." He thought that directing her "Would be like working with Bruce Campbell, whom I've known since high school, but apparently I didn't know Fran as well as I thought I did. We're still friends, but we learned a lot about each other in the course of the production. The reason it was difficult was that our conception of the best movie to make differed, arguing in trying to make the best picture possible. We did come across disagreements, but they were very healthy."

Sam Raimi lives in a section of Los Angeles called Silverlake, for the beautiful reservoir in the heart of the district, between Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles. Raimi's house is kind of rustic, with a sensational view of Silver Lake and the surrounding area; you can even see the Hollywood sign from a corner of his broad front porch.

On the day FANGORIA visits, Raimi has several friends over, including two guys from England who are trying to arrange for Raimi to make an appearance at a London film festival. Also present is close friend Scott Spiegel, who co-wrote Evil Dead II with Raimi, then went on to Thou Shalt Not Kill... Except, which starred Raimi (I'm the Except," Sam says), and is now writing The Rookie for Clint Eastwood, of all people. Spiegel promises to ask Clint if the rumor that Eastwood played the Gill-Man out of the water in Revenge of the Creature is true. But has your faithful writer heard from Spiegel on this? Noooooo.

While the two Brits and Spiegel gobble pizza and beer in the living room, Raimi talks to his journalist visitor on the front porch. It's a cool January Sunday, and the sun is going down. The chat inside and out drifts from Darkman to Sam's favorite comedies (he likes Jerry Lewis) to the movie business to Fritz Lang (whom he adores) to Raimi's own past. Did you know he used to share a house with Holly Hunter?

Mostly, though, the talk is about Darkman. "It was originally a short story I wrote, then it segued into a longer story, then a 40-page treatment," he details. "It became a story of a man who'd lost his face and had to take on other faces. Then it became a story of a man who battled criminals using this power. And then, because he lost his face, the idea of what would happen if he'd had a relationship before became important." Darkman was made in the usual way for such movies: The idea was pitched to Universal (doing what's called a "negative pickup deal"), the budget was set in the $8-12 million range, and preproduction got underway. Chuck Pfarrer wrote the first draft of the script, followed by another draft by Raimi and his brother Ivan; Daniel and Joshua Goldin wrote the fifth, then Ivan & Sam wrote the sixth through the 10th drafts. And you thought writing movies was simple.

Raimi realized that Darkman now had similarities to Hunchback of Notre Dame, Batman, The Shadow and, most particularly, The Phantom of the Opera. "God," Raimi blurts impulsively, "I wish he had a face like the Phantom of the Opera. That Lon Chaney was incredible."

In most such movies, the heroine gradually comes to realize that this ugly dude has the soul of a poet, but not in Darkman. Peyton Westlake starts out with the soul of a poet, albeit one who tends to take his lawyer girlfriend for granted. "He believes the only thing keeping him apart from the woman he loves is the fact that he's hideous," Raimi explains. "But finally, she accepts him. She says, 'I can live with it. So you're hideous. But it's not really the skin I was attracted to, it was the man beneath it that I loved.' And it's only then that he finally realizes he's changed and become something else."

The movie does, too. It starts with rich doses of Raimi humor—remember, this guy really wants to make comedies—including the fact that Darkman likes Zagnut bars and wears heavy glasses. "There's nothing worse than having this hideous burn-face and having to wear glasses, too." Raimi says with a straight face. "Usually, monsters get away without that, but not poor Darkman. He's like the rest of us, a monster with poor eyesight."

The movie heads for an almost James Bondian climax, with Darkman dangling from a helicopter and a shoot-out with rivet guns in the skeleton of a skyscraper under construction. "I've always been a big fan of thrills and chills," Raimi reveals. "I'd never done a big action scene before, and I thought that as long as I'm experimenting with character, I might as well experiment with other things, too, like big action sequences. But you know, I have yet to see a movie in the last decade that achieves the power of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It doesn't matter how many things I blow up, how many helicopters I have flying around, at some point I would like to affect the audience like Fritz Lang affected me."

Raimi is a warm and friendly person, who immediately calls people "pal" and makes them believe he means it. He is so utterly devoid of Hollywood bullshit, so goodnatured and open, that he seems as though he will never have any of the phoniness that so many people share out here. And he's modest but ambitious. He doesn't recommend his own performance in Thou Shalt Not Kill... Except because "it's a really hammy, horrible performance." He did it to learn more about acting. "My real goal is to be a great director, and someday I'm going to be a good director, a really good director. But it's going to take a few decades of making pictures and really learning about the craft, and hard work, to make that happen."

He flipped over film when his father showed some home movies, "and we were able to watch ourselves as 3-year-old kids celebrating our birthday parties." Raimi was dazzled by the technology and the time-shifting qualities of film. "The magical qualities of film, being able to capture time and replay it, in an altered reality—you can play it later, or slower, or in any order you choose. You can reassemble time, with the added enhancement of the sound of the moment. It is so fantastic, so boggling, that anything else on Earth pales in comparison. I somehow felt there was a slip in a time warp, where cinema technology fell through, slipped to a point where it shouldn't have been, decades ahead of its time."

And now he's directing. What kind of director is he? "I'm the wrong guy to ask," he warns. "I don't shout. I envision the movie from the script, and then it's really just a matter of talking to people. 'No, no, he doesn't exit at that point, he exits at this point. The wall's gotta be blue, not green. The explosion takes place here, and it's a much smaller explosion, all sparks, no fire.' I try to explain to the whole cast and crew before we start what the movie is. On a moment-to-moment basis, directing is creating those beats in the movie that have to take place in order to tell the story, as I see it."

Many writers and directors place tremendous emphasis on the structure of a script: the three basic acts, the sequences, the scenes, the beats, making sure the story is told in a strong, coherent style. But Raimi sighs. "I wish I could say that I was a strong believer in structure, but I'm not a good enough writer. I know that story is very important, and I'm trying to learn about story and characters. That's what I'm going to learn in the '90's.

"My goal has always been to entertain the audience, and in doing so, to turn a profit for the investors—in this case, Universal," he reasons. "Unfortunately, I've never made a picture that made money. Stephen King's endorsement helped take Evil Dead from obscurity into the spotlight, and I'm very thankful for that. I've never been able to make a hit picture, but that's never been my goal. It has always been to make the best movie possible, to entertain the audience. I always thought those two were synonymous. Maybe they are. Maybe I haven't achieved the goal I've set out to achieve." He looks out at Silver Lake, with the sunset light on his face. Things have suddenly turned serious, and his interviewer wants to assure him that he knows of no other director Raimi's age (barely 30) who shows more promise than Raimi does, and only one or two who show as much. It's about to get all maudlin and sticky when Spiegel and the Brits burst out the door with a camera.

Photos are taken in every possible configuration, countless pizzas are consumed, and Spiegel and Raimi start doing Tor Johnson's's appearance on You Bet Your Life with Spiegel doing Tor and Raimi doing an uncanny Groucho Marx. The time for seriousness has passed. But the thought remains: If Raimi can continue to grow as a filmmaker as much as he did between Evil Dead and Evil Dead II (and if Darkman tuns out as well as the trailer indicates), this guy is going to be one of the great directors of the next decade.