robert tapert Tagged Articles at Cinematical

If you're coming late to the party for The Evil Dead, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. You may pop the movie into your DVD player, watch the first awkwardly-shot sequence, in which five friends drive to an isolated cabin in the woods, and giggle at how amateurish it looks. You may watch the next few scenes, in which the friends settle into the cabin, stumble upon an old tape recording, listen to a man on tape solemnly describing his discovery of an ancient Book of the Dead and how his wife turned into a demon and bodily dismemberment became necessary, and start to question why anyone would think this piece of crap was any kind of a horror classic.

But maybe you were amused by Bruce Campbell mugging as Ash, or noticed the myriad fresh camera angles presenting the action, or the extreme close-ups on eyes, or liked the low-budget aesthetic, and decided to give it a chance. And then one of the five friends wanders out into the woods, against all common sense, and the woods attack her -- yes, that's right, the woods attack her -- and she barely escapes back into the cabin, and then one by one the friends start turning into demons, and bodily dismemberment becomes a viable solution. And then you might say to yourself, "Ah, that's why."

Sam Raimi (writer/director), Robert Tapert (producer) and Bruce Campbell (actor/co-executive producer) had been making 8mm movies in Michigan before tackling their first feature, a micro-budget horror movie that they envisioned as a "quintessential drive-in movie," and The Evil Dead works best as a communal experience, where audiences tend to laugh at the amateurish seams, scream at the blood and gore, and then start laughing at the blood and gore simply because it's so over the top that laughter is the only appropriate response. But Raimi, especially, was disappointed that people laughed, because he intended to make a straightforward horror flick.

Director Sam Raimi, best known for such films as The Evil Dead and the hugely successful Spider-Man franchise, is expanding his repertoire as a content creator and entering into production on several projects for multi-platform horror/thriller site Fearnet. According to Variety, the versatile Raimi will produce at least the first two projects for the site which was launched five months ago by Sony, Comcast and Lionsgate and potentially may produce more down the road -- including a possible feature-length project. The projects, which Raimi will produce with partner Robert Tapert via their Ghost House Pictures company, will be broken into seven segments, or "webisodes," with each segment having a running time of five to seven minutes.

The webisodes will be supported by ads and will be available across multiple platforms supported by Fearnet, including on-demand cable, streaming Internet video and mobile phones. The first project out of the gate for Raimi and Fearnet will be Devil's Trade. The horror/thriller, scripted by Ben Ketai and directed by Toby Wilkins, concerns three teenagers who end up being cursed after they buy an item off the Internet and is expected to premiere in June. The second project, also scripted by Ketai and based on the Steve Niles graphic novel, will serve as a prequel to the feature film 30 Days of Night, a Ghost House/Columbia Pictures horror/ thriller about vampires who go to a small, isolated Alaskan town to feast during the long winter but run into a sheriff with other ideas.

The second project will premiere in advance of the film's planed October release and will tell the story leading up to the vampire's journey to the town and also provide some hints to the storyline of the film. Once the first two project get off the ground, Fearnet and Ghost House will continue their relationship a produce more projects because, according to Tapert: "We've seen the digital space grow exponentially in the last few years, and Fearnet presents us with another opportunity to expand our goal in providing original content to the horror community."