Spoilers for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will obviously follow from here on out.
As far as the Marvel Cinematic Universe goes, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness leans much harder into horror than any other project in the franchise’s long and illustrious history, and even then we’re definitely underselling it by a huge amount.
Not only that, but the levels of violence and surprisingly high body count have taken plenty of viewers by surprise, to the extent that many have been left wondering how the hell Multiverse of Madness managed to scrape past the MPAA with a PG-13 rating.
One of the most gruesome scenes comes at Illuminati headquarters, where a vengeful Wanda Maximoff absolutely destroys the superhero team in head-popping fashion. In a recent interview with IndieWire, scribe Michael Waldron revealed that even a horror veteran like Raimi was shocked at what he found.
“I wrote gruesome deaths because Sam Raimi was directing and I shocked Sam. Sam was like, ‘Can we do this?,’ and I was like, ‘You can. Because it’s you, I think we can.’ I felt a lot of freedom to go crazy in this movie because it was Sam, and because I know what he’s so great at and he would do it so well. I just gave him the building blocks and some of the specifics of how that stuff goes down, [but it] was straight out of his twisted mind.”
That’s an endorsement if ever there was one given Raimi’s background in blood, guts, and gore, with fans in full agreement that the decimation of the Illuminati was an undoubted highlight from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
