The only superhero movie of the Coen brothers’ career: “They were instrumental early on”

The Coen brothers’ career has spanned a variety of genres. From screwball comedies to cutthroat thrillers, and westerns to spy movies, they’ve always managed to put their own unique spin on familiar, well-worn tropes. One kind of picture they’ve never been associated with, though, is the superhero movie, despite being instrumental in getting one of those very projects off the ground in the late ’80s. Hell, they even cameoed in the movie as a favour to the director, who just happened to be one of their best friends in the world.

In the ’80s, the Coens were almost inseparable from a director who would go on to create one of the most beloved horror trilogies of all time and the blockbusting superhero trilogy that arguably kicked off the modern superhero industrial complex. The brothers first met this helmer in 1980 when Joel was working as an assistant to editor Edna Paul, who was hired to edit a gruesome indie horror movie made on a shoestring budget.

That movie was, of course, The Evil Dead, and the director was Sam Raimi, who bonded with Joel during the editing process. They struck up a friendship, and Raimi was instrumental in the brothers deciding to shoot a prototype trailer to drum up investment for their own debut movie, 1984’s Blood Simple. In that trailer, the main character was played by Bruce Campbell, the star of Raimi’s gonzo horror debut.

Over the next several years, Raimi and the Coens built their careers brick by brick, helping each other along the way wherever they could. The brothers helped Raimi write the script for his Evil Dead follow-up Crimewave, a movie that turned out so badly that everyone involved has largely disowned it. The Coens then made 1987’s Raising Arizona for 20th Century Fox, while Raimi returned to the well for Evil Dead II, which fully embraced his skill for over-the-top gore, slapstick humour, and innovative camera work.

After a long and tortured production history, Raimi’s next project – his debut for a major studio – finally arrived in 1990. For many years, he had tried to secure the rights to The Shadow, a classic pulp character who many saw as one of the precursors of modern comic book superheroes like Batman. Unfortunately, Universal Pictures owned the rights and was developing its own project, so Raimi was sent back to the drawing board. Instead of admitting defeat, though, he decided to create his own Shadow-esque character influenced by pulp novels, Universal horror movies, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera, and superheroes.

From this smorgasbord of influences came Darkman, a horribly disfigured scientist who uses his prototype ‘synthetic skin’ to become a master of disguise. He then hunts down the criminals responsible for stealing his research and leaving him for dead. Raimi’s tale of “a non-superpowered man who is a hideous thing who fights crime” was greenlit by Universal in 1987, and he began work on the script, which proved to be a lot more difficult to craft than he’d imagined.

“There are 5,000 names on that script,” producer Robert Tapert told The Hollywood Reporter in 2020. “It was constantly being rewritten. In hindsight, I am not sure it ever got better; it just incorporated more people’s passes.”

Indeed, when Raimi started trying to put the script together, he needed some help laying out the basic structure of the dark superhero story – and that’s where his old pals the Coens came in. “The Coen brothers were not credited by the guild, but they were instrumental early on with building the structure,” Tapert confirmed. “The idea sprung from Sam’s head, and Joel and Ethan coaxed him along that road.”

Other writers, including former Navy SEAL Chuck Pfarrer, Daniel and Joshua Goldin (Night at the Museum), and Raimi’s brother Ivan, were brought in as the script went through 12 distinct drafts before finally landing on one everyone was happy with. Ultimately, though, a hit movie was the result, and eagle-eyed viewers could even catch the Coens in their ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ cameo. Fittingly, the brothers played the driver and passenger of the famous 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88, Raimi’s first car, which has appeared in every one of his movies.