“I owe a hell of a lot to FANGORIA magazine,” Sam Raimi says firmly. “They promoted EVIL DEAD when we couldn’t get any distribution for the picture.”

However, his connection with the magazine predates its assistance in getting his first movie released. “I loved FANGORIA,” says Raimi, whose supernatural drama THE GIFT opens December 20 in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the country January 19. “It was the modern FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND. To have an article about something you were involved with in FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND would have been ultra-cool, and it was just as cool with FANGORIA and its bold color pictures. It was a kind of courageous magazine at the time, too, which many magazines have followed--but it was daring to be about horror and science fiction.”

Back in Detroit, Raimi explains, “Scott Spiegel was the big FAMOUS MONSTERS collector, and he’d bring by all the issues for us to read. That was so much more important then than anything around now. There was no video, so it was the common way for us geeks to learn that these movies even existed, and then lived again in those pages.”

Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Rob Tapert eventually made EVIL DEAD using more courage and imagination than shrewd business sense, and then found the movie hard to sell. “We couldn’t sell the movie to anybody, anybody,” the director recalls. “They looked at it and said, ‘No way, we’re not going to touch that with a 10-foot flagpole, and it’s 16mm to boot.’

“ ‘But we can blow it up to 35.’

“ ‘ Uh-huh. But we don’t like your movie is the real problem.’ ”

However, they managed to get it shown at the Cannes Film Festival, where Stephen King saw it--and was absolutely blown away. “Stephen King wrote a very positive review extolling the virtues of the picture,” Raimi remembers. Then FANGORIA covered it, too.

“It was a breathtaking moment when suddenly there was an article in Fango about a picture I had made,” Raimi says. “Suddenly something changed dramatically for me. I was a part of something that I loved. Not just a part as a reader, but a part of the movies that made FANGORIA what it was. I was on the other side of the desk, and it was a thrill.”

Furthermore, now “everyone sat up and took notice, and we were able to sell it first to a foreign distributor, [Britain’s] Palace Pictures, and then shortly thereafter to New Line Cinema. Without Stephen King’s review, and had FANGORIA magazine not been involved, it would have been very, very difficult to sell EVIL DEAD. That really was one of the tools we used to sell it. Look, here are some positive reviews on the picture! Look at all the pictures from our movie in this horror magazine for the fans! They seem to like it. And they were very kind to us. So Bruce Campbell, Rob Tapert and I owe a lot to FANGORIA magazine, its readers and Stephen King. Had they not been there, I think we would have been one of those one-shot teams that disappeared, and I’d be back selling air conditioners.”