While many an aspiring screenwriter dreams of making a living churning out popcorn flicks, for Ivan Raimi, it’s just a side job.

As the writing partner of his somewhat successful director younger sibling Sam, Raimi’s credits include Darkman, Army of Darkness, Spiderman 3 and Drag Me to Hell, a stripped-down horror thriller arriving in theaters this week. But when he’s not “making up stories” with his brother, he spends his time as a doctor of osteopathic medicine, a career in which making up stories can be every bit as important.

“In medicine, especially emergency medicine, you have very little time to really understand what’s going on with somebody,” explains Raimi. “The story about what lead them to this is what I look at. There’s a beginning, middle and end. It’s much more revealing and will often tell you more than tests will. The tests are just there to confirm it.”

Sometimes, patient’s yarns are almost as fanciful as the motion picture worlds that the Raimi brothers create. “It’s hard to believe, but sometimes patients don’t tell you the truth,” Raimi confides. “How much did you drink? How’d that particular bottle get inside your body? And the most dangerous thing you can do is mind your own business. ‘I was just minding my own business in front of my house and these dudes came up and shot me!’”

Raimi took a little time before his busy night in the emergency room examining hysteria-induced swine flu cases to talk with the Writers Guild of America, West Web site about the genesis of Drag Me to Hell, what it’s like working with Sam, and how no one in Hollywood appreciates a doctor’s opinion -- until they fall off a horse, of course.

What do you think about the current “gore porn” trend in horror?

If humans are going to be hurt in the movies, I’d rather they be hurt by rubber monsters.

But were you at all influenced by the trend when writing Drag me to Hell? Did you have to make things a little gorier than you normally would so it would feel more contemporary?

That’s a good question. We started writing this so far back. We were working on Darkman, I believe, at the time. We’d reached some sort of impasse, and we had the weekend off, [so] we decided to do something else. We challenged ourselves to write a short story in the time we had. It was something that might be meant for a half-hour TV show. That was the beginning of Drag Me to Hell. We wanted to write a gypsy curse story. A story of what somebody would do if they inadvertently got cursed and the lengths they would go to to remove the curse. I think I was dating a bank teller at the time and that’s how the woman became a bank teller.

Photo: © 2009 Universal Studios, Inc. Lorna Raver in Drag Me to Hell.

It got shuffled to the bottom of the trunk, and we always wanted to work on it. Every now and then we’d dust it off and start working on it. Eventually, Sam had this company, Ghost House Pictures and said, “Yeah, we should work on it for Ghost House.” So it became more earnest. It kept going in slightly different directions. It was always a little story. Every time we had a B-story, we’d work hard to integrate it into the A-story, but it never wanted to be that. It always wanted to be the very simple, nonstop story of a curse and the clock’s ticking and what to do to remove it. It went through a lot of permutations but eventually got back to what it was originally intended to be. It’s almost completely an A-story. There’s not much subplot or subtext. The main character is on the screen 95 percent of the time.

It seems pretty old school Raimi.

Yeah, it’s also a reaction to working on the Spiderman films. They just kept getting bigger. Spiderman 3 had so many characters to service -- and the origins. We liked it, but have some mixed feelings about it. It had Venom, good Spiderman/bad Spiderman, Sandman. It had so much to explain, so a simple A-story was such a breath of fresh air for us, a simple story about one person and their dilemma.

As a writing team, what’s your creative process?

Sam likes to believe that he’s in control of me. He likes to control how many pieces of candy I eat, how much milk I’ll put in my coffee, and I like to give him that sense of control. If I want to torture him, I’ll sit in his seat.

We usually write side-by-side. Of course, he makes me sit on the left. We often write for long stretches of time per day for 2-3 days, and then we’ll come back to it, whether it’s the next week or the next two weeks, a month.

When we write, we’ll have a project that’s assigned to us, or Sam and I will come up with some very basic concept that we try to turn into a couple pages, then together we’ll work it into a five-page story, then we’ll maybe make it into a ten-page story. Then we roughly outline it as well as our limited brains can, then give it a three act structure. But we’re not super structure guys.

Occasionally, he’ll write a little bit on his own, or I’ll write a little bit on my own, but when we write together, it’s sort of an extension of playing. It’s like being a kid when you’re making up stories. That’s the advantage of working with your brother.

It’s a friendly thing or do you guys argue a lot?

Well, when we do argue, I think there’s another benefit, which is that we kind of read each other’s body language, and we may be upset, but it never lasts more than a few hours. I think with another writer, you don’t know the other person so well, so you may hold grudges or things won’t work out well, but for us, we can argue and fight and physically push each other around, but it works out.

You’re a medical doctor and a horror screenwriter. How do those two things mix?

I try to keep those two worlds really separate. At work, I don’t talk about movies and in the writing world, nobody’s really interested in medicine. For example, in Darkman, there’s a burned creature and Sam kept trying to write in, “and then he sprays himself with Bactine.” I was all, “Why are you doing that, Sam?” He’d say, “Well, that’s what happens to burned people.” I’d say, “No, we’re beyond that. Get that out of your head.” But he kept trying to sneak it in, as if that were some medical treatment.

And then he said, “What kind of machine would you have where the burned guy would be suspended upside down and twirled around with IVs going into him?” and I’d go, “That’s not a burn treatment, Sam.” He’d go, “Okay.” Then he’d write it in anyway. In the end, Hollywood wants this kind of look, so damn the facts.

Well, I guess your knowledge would be useful if there was an evisceration scene to write.

Yeah, it does come up. And it seems like whenever I’m on the set, there’s an accident and I’ve inadvertently had to be a doctor. In Army of Darkness, someone fell off a horse and in The Quick in the Dead, someone had a heart attack, and I had to fly with them. But in general, I try to keep these two worlds separate because I need to focus. It’s not like in the long run it gets me more respect, or I’d be a better doctor.