An in-depth Look at special FX artist Tom Sullivan and how he helped get “The Evil Dead” off the ground with the help of some of his friends.
Sam Raimi’s groundbreaking horror hit “The Evil Dead” was released in theaters in October of 1981 to an unsuspecting public. Made on a shoestring budget of only $375,000, the film earned almost $30 million worldwide, cementing Raimi and his star Bruce Campbell as forces to be reckoned with. They would later collaborate on two sequels, “Evil Dead II,” “Army of Darkness,” and a TV show, “Ash vs Evil Dead.” They would also produce the 2013 “Evil Dead,” a soft reboot and continuation, and a fifth film, “Evil Dead Rise,” released this year. Collectively, the franchise to date has grossed $301,858,249 worldwide.
“The Evil Dead” became a massive breakout hit thanks to the three men who spearheaded the film, director Sam Raimi, who would later go on to make the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy as well as “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” Rob Tapert, the film’s producer, who has worked with Raimi steadily over the years from “The Evil Dead” to “Darkman” to “The Quick and the Dead” to “Drag Me to Hell,” and the movie’s star, Bruce Campbell, who has become a cultural icon and travels the world attending horror conventions, sometimes as his Evil Dead alter-ego, Ash Williams.
While many people who worked on “The Evil Dead” haven’t been as fortunate, it goes without saying that without them, especially Tom Sullivan, a special effects artist, the movie wouldn’t have been as successful. He worked with Raimi on his two previous low-budget films, “It’s Murder!” (1977) and “Within the Woods” (1978), a short proof-of-concept movie that was made to show potential investors what they were capable of, eventually securing them $90,000 towards the budget of “The Evil Dead.” He worked as a special makeup effects artist using foam latex and fake blood and was responsible for the stop-motion animation effects in the film’s finale. He also designed and created the Book of the Dead (or the Necronomicon) as it appears onscreen and the illustrations and symbols on the book’s pages.
While moviegoers didn’t particularly care about the plot, a bunch of kids stay in a cabin in the woods, and one by one, they are attacked by unseen supernatural forces, it was the blood and gore that made the film a raging success, so much so that it is still banned in some countries today. Tom Sullivan’s pre-CGI practical effects made the movie scary and frighteningly real.
“Invaluable: The True Story of an Epic Artist,” written, produced, and directed by Ryan Meade, is a love letter to a man who helped define a generation of horror through his use of realistic and practical effects that is still felt around the world today. While he worked, in a smaller capacity, on “Evil Dead II,” and even less on “Army of Darkness,” he travels the world attending horror conventions where he said his love and appreciation by the fans for his work is the greatest compliment he’s ever received.
Sullivan talks about meeting Raimi, Tapert, and Campbell for the first time and his experiences with all the movies they made together. It also gets personal as we learn that while he was working in North Carolina on “Evil Dead II,” his wife, Penny, died in a boating accident, which caused him to finish up on the movie and disappear from the public eye for many years. A few years later, he was involved in a car accident in which he received a closed-head injury which doctors misdiagnosed for three years, blaming his depression on his wife’s death. Later, he would illustrate role-playing games for Chaosium Inc., the creators of “The Call of Cthulhu,” and wrote a 4-issue comic called “Tom Sullivan’s Books of the Dead: Devilhead.”
Today, Sullivan is retired from the industry and spends his free time traveling around the country, attending horror conventions, and meeting fans who he says are highly creative and intelligent. I had never heard of Tom Sullivan before seeing “Invaluable: The True Story of an Epic Artist,” but it has given me a greater appreciation for special effects and makeup artists. While I am an independent filmmaker myself, I have never made anything as fantastical as “The Evil Dead,” my films are mainly dramas but one day, when I get around to adapting a horror script a friend of mine wrote called “God’s Chosen,” I might just give Mr. Sullivan a call and see if I can talk him out of retirement—one last time.
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