10/12/2025
Once upon a time, there were barely any superhero movies. But Sam Raimi wanted to make his own, so he made Darkman.
Flush off the cult success of Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, young independent director Sam Raimi set his sights on making a superhero movie…of sorts. The result was Darkman, a twisted horror/action hybrid that featured a young Liam Neeson and ended up plumbing much darker psychological depths than even Tim Burton’s Batman — the only big superhero blockbuster around at the time — while giving Raimi’s bizarre sense of madcap humor a bigger playground to romp around in.
Raimi made Darkman because, as a relatively unknown filmmaker, no one would give him the rights to make The Shadow or Batman even though he pursued both. In Bruce Campbell‘s memoir If Chins Could Kill, Raimi told his longtime collaborator, “I really wanted to make The Shadow. But Universal Studios wouldn’t give me the rights to that. I met with them, but they didn’t like my views at all, so I went, ‘I’m just gonna write my own superhero.'”
In a 23-minute vintage interview included on the Blu-ray, Raimi explains that the source of the film was a short story he wrote and later expanded into a film treatment about a man who is robbed of his face and must therefore wear the faces of others. If he couldn’t adapt an existing superhero to film, he would simply make one up on his own.
