It happens almost every time. Whenever a cult/horror director breaks through into the mainstream, die hard fans quickly begin to wonder when he'll return to his original genre. People are still waiting for Peter Jackson to return to “Bad Taste” territory. Nerds hopelessly pined for David Cronenberg to get back to body horror. With Sam Raimi, fans wondered for years when he'd stopped messing around with highfalutin' thrillers and spider men and create more gory mayhem. Since I'm use to directors leaving their genre roots behind and never looking back, I was genuinely surprised when Raimi announced a return to horror in 2008. While “Drag Me to Hell” wasn't quite the “Evil Dead 4” we had been anticipating for years, it would become pretty damn beloved in its own right.
Christine Brown thinks she has her life in order. She’s rising through the ranks at her job as a bank loan officer. She has recently become engaged to boyfriend Clay, even if his rich snob parents don’t approve. That is when she denies a loan to Mrs. Ganush, an elderly Roma woman. In retaliation, Ganush violently attacks Christine and tears a button from her coat. She places a curse on the girl. For three days, she will be tormented by visions of Ganush and a demonic entity called Lamia. At the end of the three days, Lamia will personally drag Christine to Hell. Christine pursues increasingly desperate means to save herself.
Much like “The Evil Dead” pulling from a number of classic horror tropes, “Drag Me to Hell” sees Raimi combining his influences once more. The film is blatantly in the mold of EC Comics, of someone morally in the wrong getting their comeuppance, of increasingly ghastly ghouls and revenge from beyond the grave. Mrs. Ganush is a culmination of Raimi’s career-long obsession with creepy witch villains. The plot — a curse that’s passed via object, that climaxes with a demon appearing after several days — is obviously reminiscent of “Curse of the Demon.” The film is also an example of the “gypsy’s curse” premise, a totally racist concept that Raimi makes no attempt to subvert or criticize.
When the film was announced to have a PG-13 rating, I was skeptical. How would Sam Raimi make a true return to the genre without “Evil Dead”-style gore? The film found a novel solution by utilizing a number of other gross bodily fluids. Upon being introduced, Mrs. Ganush coughs up a brown loogie into a napkin. During a nightmare scene, she vomits worms and bugs into Christine's face. Splattered eyeballs and brains are later similarly splattered. Flies buzz in and out of her mouth. A gooey eyeball glares from a slice of cake. Ganush attempts to bite her with slimy gums. A regular nose bleed for Christine evolves into a geyser of blood, which is somehow nastier than the typical blood spray you expect from a Raimi film. If Raimi couldn't make a super bloody horror film, he seemed to determined to make the grossest horror film he could. The film successfully makes the audience gag several times.
I was also concerned that, after making the CGI-filled “Spider-Man” films, Raimi would load his return to horror with too much computer generated flashiness. “Drag Me to Hell” does feature its share of modern effects. Ganush appears as a hanky and tries to fly down her Christine's throat, as an example of the visual trickery on screen. However, Raimi smartly utilizes CGI to enhance the film's thrills, not distract from them. When the Lamia spirit first appears in Christine's house, we get some pretty cool shots of shadows stretching under doors and across rooms. As the effects get crazier, with bloody smoke pluming out of mouths or the ground opening up, the film reaches an atmosphere of exciting, fun house-style thrills were just about anything can happen.
Another thing that made “Drag Me to Hell” unexpected in 2009 is that horror/comedies were hardly mainstream at the time. The film was sold as a regular shock-heavy horror flick, akin to “The Grudge” movies Raimi produced. Yet “Drag Me to Hell” has its own delightfully wacky sense of humor. It starts early on. There's a deliberate ridiculousness to an old woman, even a witch-like one, tackling a younger person so viciously. Especially when she starts getting staples fired into her face. There is, admittedly, a feeling of cartoony ludicrousness to many of the attack scenes. Mrs. Ganush even has an anvil dropped on her head in one scene! During the climatic exorcist sequence, the film goes delightfully nuts. We have a demonically possessed goat rasping in a baa-ing voice, a demon gleefully dancing through the ear (which so much feels like something out of “Evil Dead 2”), and the phrase “Pork queen!” being used as an insult. It's so much fun.
And yet there does seem to be another meaning to the wacky, gruesome events that play out. Christine is trying to escape her past, hoping to become more sophisticated than the country bumpkin she grew up as. Most prominently, Christine was a fat kid. The demon seems to delight in reminding her of this embarrassing past she hopes to bury. Subsequently, most of the abuse seen throughout the film is delivered to the mouth. A number of objects are ejected from or into someone's throat. At one point, the ghost of Ganush shoves her entire arm down Christine's throat. Another important moment has Christine about to eat a slice of sugary, delicious cake before it becomes a monstrous, disgusting sight. Which raises an interesting question: Is “Drag Me to Hell” about eating disorders? Does Ganush and the Lamia become representations of a condition Christine feels shame over, something so secret the film doesn't even bring it up directly? While I have no idea if this was intentional – it doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the movie's idea – but too many of these choices seem deliberate for me not to wonder.
Despite that, a movie entitled “Drag Me to Hell” does create certain expectations in its viewer. It's an awesome title, a ballsy in-your-face exploitation movie title that came during a time when the horror genre seemed ashamed to do something like that. (You can easily imagine the movie being entitled “Accursed” or “Damned” or something boring like that.) Raimi clearly understands this as well. Christine seems to triumph over her demonic persecution, seemingly reversing the curse and defeating Ganush and Lamia... Before an ironic twist shows a simple mistake undid her plan. In the film's final minutes, she does indeed get dragged down to Hell. It might've come off as mean-spirited if the film hadn't so perfectly captured that EC Comics feeling, were cosmic justice must be dealt out. And also because, if you call your movie “Drag Me to Hell,” you better damn well see someone dragged to hell.
Supporting Lohman throughout the film is a similarly solid supporting cast. Justin Long plays her boyfriend in a way that is so subtly good, I wonder if he did it on purpose. See, in modern terms, we'd probably call Clay a “fuckboy.” He's super smug and overly invested in his own intelligence. More than once, he dismisses his girlfriend's concerns in a rather callous way, coming awfully close to gaslighting her. This is so on-type for the roles Long normally plays that I wonder if it was an intentional subversion or not. Lorna Raver leaps into the role of Mrs. Ganush with a full-hearted ferocity, snarling, spitting, and acting out with every ounce of her being. She's the perfect performer for this kind of part. Dileep Rao and Adriana Barraza, as the mystics that attempt to help Christine, are also well cast, both adding a layer of respectable importance to their roles.
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