Happened across Sam Raimi’s ’93 classic Army of Darkness last night and chuckled my way through it.

In the sequence where the Deadites attack Arthur’s castle, I was struck by the similarities between it and Jackson’s Helms Deep sequence from The Two Towers. Not in scale of course; but both are night sequences, certain shots from the Raimi film appear to anticipate much larger and more polished shots in Helms Deep, and there were enough rough paralells that I began to muse on the topic.

Consider Jackson’s 1992 Dead Alive. Though much more over the top than AOD, it also takes the slapstick approach to horror as a genre. An aside: what is up with the goatse reference on that poster?

Fast forward to three years ago. Note that Raimi’s Spider-Man actually beats each one of Jackson’s LOTR films at the box office. It also entered release as Jackson was probably fine-tuning TTT.

Finally, I think it should be noted that many of the folks that worked on LOTR worked for Raimi even longer than they worked for Jackson: Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules were shot in NZ for the series’ entire run.

So I think a reasonable case can be made for the two filmmakers being aware of each others’ work. I suspect they like each others’ stuff, actually. But did Jackson insert certain sequences into Helms Deep as a tip of the helmet to Raimi?

Cursory Googling did not yield others wondering about this. A similar lack of attributed quotes by Jackson on this specific proposition or on Raimi’s work in general leads me to guess that no-one’s spent time with Jackson talking about Raimi’s work of late.

I shall add it to my list of questions for the bearded one!