My brain is littered with trivia from the half-century relationship between Stephen King and Hollywood, and among my favorites is a strange connection between the author and director Sam Raimi. While the filmmaker has never taken the helm of a King movie, he’s had on-camera roles in two of adaptations: 1994’s The Stand and 1997’s The Shining. It’s a fun little oddity – but fans of both men know that their connection goes far deeper than that.
Raimi’s new film Send Help is arriving in theaters this week, and CinemaBlend’s own Jeff McCobb recently had the chance to talk with him about the special influence of Stephen King on his career… though the filmmaker admits he doesn’t love the likening of the 2026 movie to Misery. That story and a 20th anniversary reflection on the 2006 novel Cell comprise this week’s edition of The King Beat, so let’s dig in!
Sam Raimi Has Nothing But Love For Stephen King, Who He Credits For His “Chance In The Business”
One of the most admirable aspects of Stephen King’s career is that he has regularly used his influence and success to shine a light on creatives who otherwise might be operating in the dark. In addition to philanthropic acts like providing scholarships and co-founding the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, he publicly highlights books he’s reading and movies and television shows he is watching. In recent years, this work has mostly been on social media platforms, but the reality is that his reputation for patronage goes back decades, with the story of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead being a perfect example.
It’s a story that Raimi enthusiastically retold during a recent sit down with CinemaBlend – captured in the video above. For those unaware, the filmmaker (along with pals Bruce Campbell and Rob Tappert) made the famed horror movie as their first feature while they were students at Michigan State University, and while the movie is now regarded as a landmark title in the history of the horror genre, it most definitely wasn’t perceived in that light by most when the search began for a distribution deal. Raimi recalled,
[Stephen King] gave me my chance in the business. When when Evil Dead was trying to be sold as a, you know, a 16 millimeter blow up in the Cannes Film Market – not the festival, but the market is the shady dealings going on underneath the prestigious film festival, where buyers from Spain or Italy will buy an inexpensive American film and the the marketers knows, ‘Oh, Italy will have 200 theaters will play this kind of film.’ And they know it's worth, and they make deals. They sell it. Well, nobody would touch Evil Dead with a ten foot plague pole.
While it might be a touch hard to imagine as we exist in a modern cinematic landscape that sees the disgusting insanity of Terrifier 3 become a box office hit, The Evil Dead was considered far too extreme to be palatable for audiences in the early 1980s, and distributors were scared off. The film needed a trusted voice to support it, and it found one in Stephen King.
At the time of the 1982 Cannes Film Festival/Market where this all went down, King was only 8 years removed from the initial publication of his first novel, but he was already well-recognized as a literary phenomenon, his bibliography at that point including Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, Firestarter and Cujo. Fate put him in the theater for a preview screening of The Evil Dead, and he was floored by the experience. Raimi continued,
And then Stephen King happened to be in the theater in Cannes, the market. He saw it, and he gave us a great review in Twilight Zone magazine. And I was so honored because he was my giantest, largest hero, still is. He's a tremendous influence.
The piece for Twilight Zone Magazine – which can easily be found online – is most definitely effusive, as King comes just short of calling the young Raimi a filmmaking prodigy (He writes in the review, “That [Sam Raimi] is a genius is yet unproven; that he has made the most ferociously original horror film of 1982 seems to me beyond doubt.”) The stamp of approval proved transformative for the fate of The Evil Dead, as the movie got critics interested, found distribution in Britain, became an underground success, and eventually got picked up stateside by New Line Cinema.
There is no questioning that Sam Raimi feels a level of indebtedness to Stephen King and has nothing but respect for the master of horror… but he also got honest about not loving how industry trades have drawn a direct line between Send Help and Misery – in regards to both the original novel and Rob Reiner’s Oscar-winning 1990 adaptation.
You May Get Some Misery Vibes From Send Help, But Don’t Let Them Overly Influence Your Experience With The New Horror Movie
When Deadline reported in July 2024 that Raimi was making his latest feature, the article said the movie was a mix of that story and Robert Zemeckis’ Castaway, and the director feels that’s a tad reductive:
As far as Misery is concerned, I love the book. And Rob Reiner's film is brilliant and Kathy Bates is awesome. But when I read in Variety [sic], ‘Oh, Send Help is going to be like a mix between Misery and Castaway,’ I thought I'd rather not have those references. As much as I love both the movies and they're both great classics, I want it to be its own thing.
It’s a reasonable perspective: no creative wants to be telling an original story and then get told that they are just riffing on a couple of stories that already exist. And while I personally think there are some legitimate points of comparison between Send Help and Misery, there are also considerable differences.
In the new film, Rachel McAdams plays a middle-aged woman named Linda Liddle who gets the opportunity to upend the power dynamic between her and her sexist, nepo baby boss Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) when they survive a plane crash together and get stranded on a deserted island. While Bradley is injured and helpless without the comforts of modern life, Linda is an enthusiastic Survivor fan who is plenty prepared to tame the wild.
In that broad view, it’s not particularly difficult to draw lines between the two films: Linda is the Annie Wilkes to Bradley’s Paul Sheldon. But the details make it much less clear cut. For one thing, Linda is anything but Bradley’s “number one fan,” and while she ends up making some very questionable decisions morally as the story progresses, she is the protagonist instead of the antagonist, and she is not dealing with the same kind of untreated psychological maladies of the iconic Kathy Bates character.
Just as I did in my four-star CinemaBlend review of Send Help, I’m doing my best to dance around spoilers here because I highly recommend anyone and everyone go see it in theaters this weekend, regardless of the strength of the Stephen King vibes. While recognizing that we’re only five weeks into 2026, it’s really hard to imagine that we won’t be looking back on it in December as one of the best genre movies of the year.
On Its 20th Anniversary, Cell Remains One Of The More Confounding Stephen King Books
To close out this week’s column, I’ll highlight a notable anniversary in King history, as it was this week 20 years ago (on February 24, 2006, to be specific) that the novel Cell first arrived in book stores. Arriving about a year-and-a-half before Apple revolutionized the world with the introduction of the iPhone, King’s book looked at the extreme ubiquity of mobile phones in the early years of the 21st century, and he found specific inspiration when he was walking on a street in New York City and saw a man in a business suit who appeared to be talking to himself. Per StephenKing.com. the author confused the man’s use of a wireless headset for a mental episode, and the creative seed was planted.
The novel explores what would happen if everyone’s cell phones began transmitting a signal that first turned people feral before collecting survivors into a giant hive mind, and while it has some interesting ideas, I can’t say it stands among my favorite King novels. A part of the problem is that the action peaks too early, as the chaos that unfurls at the start is far and away its most compelling sequence, and protagonist Clay Riddell and deuteragonists Tom McCourt and Alice Maxwell aren't the kinds of rich characters to which Constant Readers have become well-accustomed.
It’s not the nonsense that can be read from the height of Stephen King’s addictions or post-accident eras (looking at you, Tommyknockers and Dreamcatcher), but I also feel like Cell is the kind of novel from the canon that you only pick up at this point if you’re making the effort to read the author’s full canon.
That brings me to the end of this week’s edition of The King Beat, but as ever, I’ll be back here on CinemaBlend next Thursday with a brand new column highlighting and exploring all of the biggest news to come out of the world of Stephen King. And should you be looking for some related reading while you wait, please peruse my Adapting Stephen King series, reflecting on the full history of movie and TV adaptations of the author’s books and stories.
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