- February 02, 2026
- By Sala Levin ’10
Most 6-year-olds watching movies in the mid-’90s were twirling along as Belle danced with the Beast in his cavernous ballroom or hoisting younger siblings aloft for benediction like baby Simba.
Not Zainab Azizi ’12. After a relative gifted her a box full of B horror films on VHS, Azizi gobbled up movies like Peter Jackson’s gore-spattered zombie comedy “Dead Alive” and Sam Raimi’s demonic possession “Evil Dead” trilogy. She became a fiend for the genre. “Going to Blockbuster on a Friday night was my dream come true.”
She's no longer just renting movies that make you cover your eyes. Azizi is now president of Raimi Productions, and she’s a producer on Raimi’s newest film, “Send Help,” a darkly comedic thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien that opened Friday.
In the film, McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a skilled but underappreciated employee at a consulting firm who’s passed over for a well-deserved promotion by her arrogant new boss, Bradley Preston (O’Brien). While flying to a business trip in Bangkok, the company plane goes down and Linda and Bradley end up the only survivors on a deserted island, forced into a psychological battle of wits–and a “Survivor”-esque physical endurance test–to live.
“Everyone’s been that burnt-out employee who hasn’t been valued or whose work doesn’t get any credit,” said Azizi. “I thought it was a really fun wish fulfillment story.”
Azizi’s own path to wish fulfillment started at age 14, when she visited relatives in Los Angeles and “fell in love with the city,” she said. After graduating from UMD with a degree in sociology, she moved to LA and landed a job in the basement mailroom of talent agency William Morris Endeavor.
She rose, literally and figuratively, to temporary assistant, then a full-time assistant, moving from agent to agent every six to 12 months. “To me, that was my grad school,” said Azizi. “I learned everything, because I didn’t have a connection or any formal education in film.”
Eventually, Azizi connected with Raimi on a project. Raimi, whose body of work included “A Simple Plan,” “The Quick and the Dead” and “The Gift” before he helmed the blockbuster Tobey Maguire “Spider-Man” trilogy, spotted a talent for producing in Azizi, and brought her under his wing in 2018. Azizi became president of his company the following year and later spearheaded the development of “Send Help,” bringing the idea to Raimi after meeting with its writers.
“Zainab came to me and said, ‘I just heard this story, and it’s great. We have to get involved with it,’” Raimi has said. ”I met with the writers and Zainab, and we heard their pitch. It was great, as she promised. I was excited by it.”
Together, the pair convinced McAdams, known for playing sweet, sunny characters, to take on a role with more edge. “When you see her, you just fall in love with her,” said Azizi. “To see someone like her go dark—we’ve never seen that before.”
The cast and crew, including Azizi, traveled to the island of Phuket off the coast of western Thailand for the roughly three-month shoot. Filming on a beach had a unique set of challenges; sand sweepers were employed to wipe away footprints before every shot, keeping up the deserted quality of the island.
Azizi hopes that audiences are spooked, surprised and startled, and that they take away what she considers the film’s main message: “Everybody is fighting a battle that you don’t know about.”
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