Our sister horror site ShockTillYouDrop.com recently spoke with director Sam Raimi about the upcoming Starz series Ash vs Evil Dead, which reunites Raimi with Bruce Campbell to revisit their earliest creation Ashley “Ash” Williams from 1981’s The Evil Dead, putting him into a new battle with the “Deadites.”
Eventually, the interview got around to Raimi’s interest in returning to other things, specifically the 1990 dark superhero thriller Darkman, starring Liam Neeson in one of his earliest action roles and which is celebrating its 25th Anniversary this year. It didn’t do great theatrically, but it still spawned a number of direct-to-video sequels (with which Raimi wasn’t involved) as well a short fan film by Chris Notarile. (And if you’re a superhero movie fan and you haven’t seen it, shame on you!)
When they asked him whether he has thought about revisiting it, this was his response:
“Yes, but not personally, not as a director, maybe as a producer, to bring that character back. I’ve always wanted to. Maybe one day we will. I never thought about it for TV, but I like the character and it is an interesting mix of ‘Phantom of the Opera” and ‘The Shadow’ and whatever else, and I’d love to get back into that.”
So that would be pretty cool if Raimi tries a similar thing as they’ve been doing with The Evil Dead with Darkman and it would be especially cool if he got back involved.
In video game news, Raimi also gave them a progress report on the Screen Gems adaptation of the PlayStation horror game The Last of Us, saying that Neil Druckmann already turned in a first draft screenplay and is working on another draft while at the same time developing another video game.
“I don’t know what his time schedule is right now,” Raimi said. “I think he’s working on another videogame right now, so I think that’s where most of his time is going at this moment, the commitments he’s made, but I’ll just wait and see if he delivers a new draft. It’d be great.”
So it might be a little more time before we see that as well, although he wasn’t sure if he wanted to direct that either.
You can read the rest of the interview with Sam Raimi over on ShockTillYouDrop.com with Ash vs Evil Dead premiering on Starz on Saturday, October 31.
