Director Sam Raimi shares the secret to the film’s most excruciating scene [Exclusive]

This article contains spoilers for “Send help”.

From 2009 to 2022, star director Sam Raimi has only directed three theatrically released feature films. He directed “Drag Me To Hell” in 2009, “Oz the Great and Powerful” in 2013, then the Marvel Cinematic Universe film “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” in 2022. Raimi, however, has a very good excuse for his absence from the big screen: he was busy raising his five children.

Raimi is back in 2026 with “Send Help”, a desert island thriller in which a hardworking office manager named Linda (Rachel McAdams) finds herself stranded with her cruel, asshole boss, Bradley (Dylan O’Brien). The film charts the shifting power dynamic between Linda and Bradley, as Linda, a “Survivor” fan, knows exactly how to survive indefinitely on a remote tropical island, while Bradley only knows how to gossip, play golf and be cruel to his subordinates. On a desert island, Linda becomes the boss.

“Send help” is a hoot. Although it is a bloody story of survival, Raimi keeps the overall tone light and almost comical. Raimi’s blends of horror and comedy have always made up a large part of his filmography, ranging until “The Evil Dead” in 1981.

There is a scene in “Send Help” where Linda asserts her dominance over Bradley by drugging him with exotic octopus excretion and holding a knife to him, explaining that it is time for him to be castrated. It’s one of the film’s most memorable scenes, and one that made audiences squirm in both discomfort and twisted pleasure. Raimi and producer Zainab Azizi recently sat down with /Film to talk about “Send Help”, they talked about the castration scene and explained that the secret to making it work was Dylan O’Brien’s performance, with only his eyes.

In the castration scene, Bradley has been drugged and is completely physically paralyzed and numb, but he is 100% lucid. Linda explains to him that the octopus toxin is an excellent anesthetic, in particular because it allows her patient to stay awake, even if he is operated on. Linda manages to tease him with a knife before cutting him, and Bradley, unable to feel pain and only able to express himself with his eyes, is completely terrified. Blood spurts over both of them as Linda seemingly stabs Bradley, and Bradley watches in horror, unable to scream. It’s like something out of an episode of “Tales from the Crypt,” and it’s pretty glorious. Linda eventually reveals that she was actually stabbing a rat just out of frame and was threatening Bradley to scare him.

Raimi and Azizi loved the scene and Azizi admitted to having a twisted sense of humor. Raimi felt that the scene worked largely because of the performances. He liked that it was a good character moment for Linda Liddle, saying:

“I think it was just a matter of writing and acting. And we really wanted – and Rachel did – to believe that she was going to carry out what she had started to reveal to us, her plan. You don’t know at first, and it slowly dawns on her. She had to make it believable, no matter how outrageous it was. And I think the audience believed it. She had to make it believable for Bradley’s character to make it real for him, for that lesson to stick, and she did it. And it worked on the audience, obviously, if it worked on him, so it was all in his hands.

So McAdams was great. But O’Brien, Raimi continued, was the real secret.

Of O’Brien’s performance, Raimi said:

“I’ve never seen a better silent performance than Dylan did during those four minutes just playing a scene with his eyeballs. […] But the blood bladder, she didn’t have to deal with that. We had mechanical effects down there, shooting bladders of blood at both actors. »

Raimi added that he liked the violence in the film, joking that “violence is gold”. But he felt that the violence in “Send Help” served a specific character purpose; it wasn’t just blood for fun. He noted that “sometimes there’s a reason a little blood makes something really intense.” Raimi does not shock the audience randomly, but to encourage them to pay more attention. To this end, regarding Linda, he declared:

“This character has gone through a huge transformation. She’s an office worker who finds herself stranded on this desert island, and there’s a rebirth that takes place because of the harshness of the island, the person that she has to find within herself to be strong enough. And it’s kind of a birthing process, and blood, I think, should have been a part of that. And I love horror movies and I love the effect they have on the audience.”

Zainab Azizi added that having so much blood on screen was not a problem for the studio. Indeed, as she explained, Fox wanted “more ‘Sam Raimi’ moments”, even though Azizi knew that Raimi himself hated the term “Sam Raimi moments”. But she added that “they were great partners, and they encouraged us to go as far as we wanted.” Raimi went very far, with all the splashes.

“Send Help” is now playing in theaters.