“I’m happy doing my own thing, I don’t really think, what if Marty Scorsese calls me? He’s not going to call. I’m not worried about that.”
Campbell Almighty
For horror fans, Bruce Campbell is a bigger star than the Toms, Hanks and Cruise — but he’s not resting on his Evil Dead Legacy. His healthy DVD sales are giving him new freedom as a filmmaker, so we caught up with the unquestioned king of schlock.
Bruce Campbell is more than a movie star; his twisted sense of humor and out-size performances have made him a B-movie icon. And he embraces that status. His autobiography was titled If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor. Not bad for a guy who made his acting debut at 14 in community productions of The King and I and South Pacific.
In his teenage downtime, he shot Super-8 movies with his friend Sam Raimi. When Campbell was 20 and Raimi 19, they went pro, shopping around their Super-8 Within the Woods to raise money for a feature film. They came up with $350,000, shot 1981’s The Evil Dead, and a cult legend was born.
Today, numerous fan sites like Deadites.net are devoted to Campbell and the Evil Dead franchise, the product line of which includes the three flicks, video games, and Army of Darkness comics and action figures. Campbell and Raimi have remained friends, and Campbell has appeared in nearly every film Raimi has directed, including brief but memorable turns in the Spider-Man blockbusters as the ring announcer who dubs Peter Parker Spider-Man and, in the sequel, as the theater usher who supplies a little comic relief.
But Campbell, 47, is looking to leave a more durable, if not more serious, mark on the world. He makes his debut as a feature-film director with his latest project, Man with the Screaming Brain, which premieres on the Sci-Fi Channel this fall after a limited theatrical run (which will coincide with Campbell’s book tour for the upcoming Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way). In the movie, Campbell plays “a raging capitalist” who goes to Bulgaria to exploit its weak economy and winds up sharing brains with a former KGB agent. Campbell has also collaborated with Dark Horse Comics on a four-part comic book that’s being labeled “the director’s cut.”
Even though he’s up to his eyeballs in brains and relationship “advice,” Campbell still took the time to dish with Penthouse about his devoted fans, the perils of fake blood, and the joys of The Sound of Music. Seriously.
Did you come up with the idea for Man with the Screaming Brain?
I’ve been polishing it for about 18 years. The idea was from a friend of mine. The story was given to my partner David Goodman in 1986, and we’ve sort of retooled it completely from stem to stern and tried to get it financed about a thousand times. It’s taken a lot of strange turns, but it’s finally making its way to the small and/or large screen.
What made you stick with it?
I’m kind of sick of boring movies that you would see on an airplane. I like stuff that’s a little edgy or weirder. That’s what attracted me — you get a rich guy and put him in a bizarre situation. You know, where it’s fun to fuck around with a main character. I always loved those Jim Thompson kind-of-seedy side stories.
So what’s it about?
It’s a redemptive story of a guy who it took this ridiculous set of circumstances to make him less of an asshole.
It sounds like a more interesting version of Jerry Maguire.
[Laughs] Okay. It’s a sociological deal, but it’s disguised as a horror film. ‘Cause I can get funding for a horror film, but that doesn’t mean you have to actually do a horror film. You can call it Man with the Screaming Brain, you get a lot of mileage out of that.
You shot the movie on a soundstage in Bulgaria. What was it like working with the Bulgarian crew?
They’re great hard workers, but everything is done through translators. Your costume designer, she’s an older tough broad, doesn’t speak English. And you have to hope that what you’re telling that person goes through. You have to adjust — that’s the real key. Obviously nobody wants to make a shitty movie, so the real trick is, how fast can you tap-dance and still have it be acceptable?
Did you develop the “Almighty” comic as a tie-in as you were developing the movie, or did it come about afterward?
It sort of came together at the same time. Once we realized we were actually going to make the movie, then we contacted Dark Horse, because I’d known [founder and president] Mike Richardson for years. He did the Army of Darkness comic spin-off, which we all thought was really classy.
Were you involved in the comic at all?
Yeah, you decide which portions of the story you keep. But you know, [AoD] was done by this guy John Bolton, who’s an artist. You’re not going to tell him what to do. And story-wise, it’s adapted from a script that already exists.
With this comic-book adaptation, the main thing was working with these guys to go, “If there’s a four-part series, where do we do the breaks?”
The comics have been referred to as a director’s cut of the movie. How did that work?
The atmosphere is back. When you make a low-budget movie, you can’t afford dick. [But] your set decoration doesn’t cost anything when you do a comic. And the same with rain, or wind, or elements, or nighttime. You can do much better cinematography. The ink guys can go crazy. The movie is all set during the day because it’s just quicker, easier, cheaper. But it was meant to be set almost all at night. And [in the comic] you can customize each character — ridiculously so. In our movie we have a mime in a suit playing a robot.
You recently penned your very own comic book for Dark Horse, The Hire: Precious Cargo. What drew you to this medium?
Mike Richardson offered it up and I thought, Well, you know, I’ve always been in this world, in these comic book-y kind of movies. I thought, What would it be like, you know? The Hire is just kind of an adult comic, where there’s a little bit of humor in there.
It’s the most visual medium. It’s like you go, “If I can show anything, what can I show?” It’s much more of a brain drain, I think. Because you make a low-budget movie, you go, “That’s the best building we can find. Okay, shoot it.” But in a comic you go, “Oh, I have to start from scratch. I can have blimp aerial shots. I can show anything.”
It sounds like you found it liberating.
I did, in a horrifying kind of way. So hopefully I’ll do another one. I’d like to do a whole new series. Assuming that Screaming Brain works for them. ‘Cause, you know, there’s always the economic reality — the stuff that you do has to be worth it to them.
I was reading a lot of your “Babblings” on your Website . Do you consider yourself a curmudgeon?
To a degree. But I think all filmmakers should adopt a certain amount of discipline in order to make better movies, because you’re always going to be put under weird parameters, unless you finance the movie yourself. You have to learn to work within those parameters the best that you possibly can, and still tell your story faithfully.
And you feel that that discipline is missing from a lot of filmmakers?
Yeah, because they cry and moan, and you hear about these guys shooting 18-hour days. Anybody who shoots an 18-hour day doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing. End of story. You can get everything done in a 12-hour day, and that’s still a long day to average America, which works eight, maybe ten hours.
That’s how you get the crew to work hard — you respect their time, too. It’s not just you. There are a lot of other people who work on a movie who, frankly, could give a shit about your movie. They just want to get home. And if you show respect to the other crew members, you’re going to get better everything.
Do you enjoy talking to the fans?
If they don’t seem interested, it’s hard for me to seem interested. But if some of them are interesting, genuine characters, I enjoy talking to them. Like a guy who’s a huge Evil Dead fan and is a Sunday-school teacher. Another guy couldn’t tell me what he did — he’d have to kill me. His wife has been married for 40 years to this guy and she doesn’t know what he does.
Are your fans as obsessive as Trekkies?
My fans look really terrifying, but they’re incredibly docile. You’ll get guys who are like six-six, dressed in leather with spikes and tattoos, piercings, all that shit, but they won’t even say a word.
You got to play Elvis in Bubba Ho-tep. Was that an Almighty dream of yours?
I think it’s the dream of every American male.
Were you always an Elvis fan?
I thought he was a loser when I first became aware of him. He was in his jumpsuit phase by then. So the respect I got was once I started to look at more of his stuff. Not so much his movies, but a lot of concert footage. In his heyday, there was no one who could touch him. No one. Not even close.
Were you surprised at the positive reviews the movie got from the Roger Eberts of the world?
Ebert’s review was hysterical, because he kept not liking it, but then he goes, “I don’t want to like this movie so much, but I sort of do.” So it was a good back-handed review.
Tell me about the Super-8 shorts you made with Sam Raimi. Were they all horror flicks?
They were all kinds of stuff. A lot of Three Stooges rip-offs; a lot of endings that go “wha, wha, wha,” a lot of pie fights; detective stories. We did a couple of war movies. A lot of them wound up being prototypes for actual films later.
Which is near and dear to your heart?
There’s one called Stryker’s War, which is about this Vietnam vet that comes back, and he and three other Marines wind up going against the Manson family in 1969. It’s a great what-if story that a buddy of mine remade into a feature. But I couldn’t be in his feature, because I was in the Screen Actor’s Guild at that point. So I have this dream of remaking it again, where I could finally be in it. Then on the DVD you’d have the Super-8 version with me in it, his version without me, and then me in it again.
Did you guys use any special effects in those movies?
Very little. Mostly we would just buy a $150 car and wreck it.
Is fake blood totally disgusting?
When we did the first couple of Evil Dead movies, it was Karo syrup-based. I had flies all over me. It really was nasty shit, and you couldn’t get it off. We were in this rural Tennessee area — the Bible Belt. We’d shoot all night, and I’m covered with blood. I can’t get my shirt off my skin because they’re fused together. So one Sunday morning, I jumped in the back of the pickup truck. I’m completely covered. We’re driving home as everyone is going out to church. I’m basically Charles Manson, waving at them with blood pouring down my face.
You’ve ranted against digital effects-laden blockbusters on your website. Will you do another low-budget horror flick to counter them?
Screaming Brain will probably be a very close example of that. I explained to the producer it’s like making a giant Super-8 movie. It’s all going to be real. We’re not going to fake much in the movie.
It was filmed in Bulgaria …. God bless them, they’ve had this holdover from the fall of communism. They had this military compound that was abandoned. There were trees four inches across growing in the parking lot. And we hired a team of laborers and we cleared the lot and revealed this compound with buildings and alleys and Quonset huts and parking lots.
We found a park that was on the grounds. No one knew it was there. We made a whole back lot. We just brought everything to the back lot. We brought gypsy carts, vehicles, and extras. It was perfect. And we got about 11 different locations out of that back lot.
The coolest thing is that they used it for the next production. I was very gratified to know that our little bogus system was appealing to other people too.
Does it ever frustrate you that you don’t get A-list parts?
No, because with Screaming Brain, for example, [being Almighty] I have as much leeway as Tom Cruise on a movie. So that’s all I care about. On a high-budget movie, I get my trailer to the left, and I have to sit down and shut up. Because of DVD sales, I can get financing to make a low-budget range of these genre movies. But there’s a lot of shades to horror. There’s horror comedy, there’s horror sci-fi, there’s graphic horror.
Did you want to play one of the big villains in Raimi’s Spider-Man movies?
So I can have a special-effects thing strapped to me for 14 weeks? “Okay, put the octopus arms on him now. Bruce, sit down on that chair. We’ll be ready for you in an hour and a half.” No. It moves too slow.
Do you have a dream role?
No, that would torture me too much, because that’s all I would think about. The trick is to try to improve what you’re working on and try to make it the best you can — whether it’s your own material or somebody else’s.
Do you have an actor or director you would love to work with?
That’s the second torture. I think there are a lot of talented guys out there, but I’m kind of just happy doing my own thing. I don’t really turn around and think, What if Marty Scorsese calls me? He’s not going to call. I’m not really worried about that. I’ve got my own low-budget Marty Scorsese shit going on.
I did a Google search for you, and it brought up about 400,000 matches. Does it shock you when you realize how big your following is?
I don’t know what 400,000 compares to. The good news is, it doesn’t really affect my everyday life. I live in Oregon, and people don’t care about movies here.
Did you ever expect the Evil Dead movies to become such hits?
No. The first one had to succeed. That was our goal. So we followed it through, which is, I think, what a lot of filmmakers don’t do. My advice to filmmakers is, follow it to the bitter fucking end, because you’re stuck with it. I’ve got filmmaker friends who go, “Hey, I made the movie, what do you want from me?” Well, yeah, but now you’ve got to sell it. Raising the money is one third of it. Making it is a third of it, and then you’ve got to sell it. Because guess what? If you’re going to make another movie, you better make money. For us, all roads definitely lead to Evil Dead.
Did it succeed initially, or did it gather a following of its own?
A little bit of both. It did a little bit of theatrical in New York and some other areas when they opened it up. But it got into video when video stores were buying every movie ever made. And we got in, I think, at a good time. Now, Evil Dead getting into a Blockbuster store would be nearly impossible. It would have to do so much money.
But I’m glad to say that I was at an Evil Dead function a couple of years ago and one of the sales guys said, “You better go and kiss that lady’s feet over there.” And I said, “Why?” He goes, “Well, she’s from Kmart, and you’re in Kmart now, so you better go say thanks.” You bet I went over and said thanks to the Kmart lady.
There’s an Evil Dead remake in the works. Are you going to be in it?
Hell no. I’m not even going to play the old guy at the bait store “You kids be careful now, watch out for those woods.”
What’s the black sheep of your films?
I’m sure there are more turds to come. You can’t avoid it. I don’t really regret doing anything like a Maniac Cop — because how else do you get experience? There are tons of actors who cross the three Roger Corman movies off their resume when they get their first art-house picture. And it’s like, you know what? Blow me. I get so offended at that.
What’s wrong with a Roger Corman movie? You probably clicked your fucking heels when you got the part.
What’s your next project?
I’m making a movie for Dark Horse Comics. It’s sort of an untitled Bruce Campbell story. Not the Bruce Campbell story, but … I’m playing myself. It’s a little bit like Galaxy Quest for the horror crowd. It’s about people who wind up taking me too seriously.
Your favorite non-horror movie?
Sound of Music. If you stripped every musical number out of it, it would still function as a really good story. It’s a classic movie. I saw it at a revival house in Detroit with a brand-new 70-millimeter print. The theater held 1,100 people, and this crowd was taken to heaven. The cinematography in the movie is probably some of the best cinematography you’ll ever see. There’s a dance number in the gazebo with the little Nazi boy and the girl, where there’s a thunderstorm — it’s classic. Robert Wise did some really cool movies.
Best of luck with the Screaming Brain franchise.
Give my regards to all the Penthouse readers. My personal opinion is that all the [readers’ letters] are absolute horseshit. They’re all lies, but I don’t want to burst anybody’s bubble.
Editor’s note: While we don’t fact-check the “Forum” letters for veracity (in terms of writers’ penis size, for instance), they are actual readers’ submissions. Mr. Campbell is welcome to visit our offices to check them out.
Future Editor’s Note: We cannot confirm that Bruce Almighty – or even regular ol’ Mr. Campbell – ever visited the Penthouse Offices. You’d think we’d have a picture somewhere had that actually happened. We did find it gratifying to learn that he was actually reading the magazine, though, seeing as how many people do not even seem to know there are words. We have more Bruce Campbell in these very pages, if you missed him the first time around. These days Evil Dead has its own archives, as well as Instagram and even Facebook. Well, the movie came out in 1981; Facebook used to be a thing. An Almighty thing, actually.
