Although Spider-Man 2 isn’t a horror movie, director Sam Raimi found a way to sneak a genius reference to his 1981 horror movie The Evil Dead in one scene. As one of the most popular and beloved characters from Marvel Comics, Spider-Man has been adapted to other media for years, and his film history so far has been quite interesting. In 2002, Sony brought Peter Parker to the big screen in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, the first entry in a trilogy that went through a couple of ups and downs.
Spider-Man was a critical and commercial hit, and it’s credited for redefining the modern superhero genre and the summer blockbuster, and its success led Sony to greenlight a sequel. Simply titled Spider-Man 2, and set two years after the events of the first movie, it saw Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) struggling to balance his personal life and his superhero duties, which lead him to an existential crisis that strips him of his powers. Meanwhile, scientist Dr. Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) becomes the villain Doctor Octopus after a failed experiment kills his wife and leaves him neurologically fused to mechanical tentacles.
Molina’s Doctor Octopus is considered one of the best villains in the superhero genre, and the character was praised for his complexity, which sets him aside from most villains in the superhero world. Octavius certainly went through a traumatic experience with the death of his wife and the tentacles becoming attached to him and controlling him, and it was this part of his story that made way for the perfect opportunity to add some horror to Spider-Man 2. Sam Raimi is known for his work in the horror genre, and he made a genius reference to his 1981 movie, The Evil Dead, in the hospital scene in Spider-Man 2, which mirrors the demonic trees in the woods that terrorized Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) and friends.
After his experiment went terribly wrong and killed his wife while also burning the inhibitor chip blocking the arms from his nervous system, Octavius was sent to the hospital, where doctors prepared to surgically remove the harness and tentacles. As the doctors were about to begin, Octavius woke up and the tentacles took over, throwing the doctors and objects across the OR and killing everyone. The scene alternates between wide shots, close-ups, the point of view of the doctors, and that of the tentacles, just like in The Evil Dead, particularly in the controversial scene in the woods where the possessed trees attacked Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss). Of course, the scene also has a fun reference to Ash Williams himself, when one of the doctors spots a chainsaw and grabs it, though the chainsaw didn’t do much to save him.
Although the scene is considered a horror one in a superhero movie, which seems odd for a Marvel movie (even one pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe), Raimi might have been able to get away with it because there’s not a single drop of blood in the scene, even though there was a massacre going on there. The hospital scene in Spider-Man 2 was the perfect opportunity for a horror reference, and a The Evil Dead one was fitting with Sam Raimi on the lead and the elements in the scene, as the tentacles were the best way to reference the madness that happened in the woods of The Evil Dead.