Bruce Campbell Says Stephen King Changed Everything for ‘The Evil Dead’: “How Fast Was That Change in Perception?”

Before Bruce Campbell lopped off his hand and replaced it with a chainsaw, he and a young Sam Raimi were trying to get people to take their homemade horror movie seriously. Then Stephen King saw The Evil Dead, and everything changed.

In a new appearance on Chris Jericho’s Talk Is Jericho, Campbell revisited King’s endorsement out of the Cannes Film Festival that became inseparable from the original movie: “The most ferociously original horror film of the year.”

You’ve probably seen it on the artwork. According to Campbell, getting permission to use it was surprisingly simple.

“So I don’t even know how we found him. Maybe through his book company,” Campbell recalled. “We’re like, ‘Can we use that quote?’ And he goes, ‘Yep.’”

“So it’s on the poster and the box and the video.”

As we’ve previously explored, King saw the movie at Cannes in 1982 and championed it in Twilight Zone magazine. The film was struggling to secure American distribution, despite finding interest overseas. King’s support helped get it taken seriously, and New Line Cinema subsequently picked it up for its U.S. release.

Think about what that endorsement meant at the time. King already had , , and behind him. Here was one of horror’s most important voices telling people they needed to see this bloody little independent movie made by a group of young filmmakers.