Drag Me To Hell
In the summer of 1908, director D.W. Griffith filmed “The Adventures of Dollie.” In the film, a gypsy seeks revenge on an unsuspecting bourgeois family after the father refuses to buy from the gypsy’s basket of goods. The gypsy kidnaps the father’s young daughter and hides her in a barrel—like you do—that eventually tumbles into a nearby river heading towards a waterfall. Guess how it ends.
In its own way, Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me To Hell” feels like an accelerated update of that earlier film, a PG-13 horror movie—and summer gypsy tale—that never settles for cheap boo scares in lieu of genuine suspense.
Oh, and what a delightfully suspenseful film Mr. Raimi has created in “Drag Me To Hell,” an exhilarating house of horrors that, like its predecessor “Evil Dead 2,” asks audiences to kiss their nerves goodbye.
Besides, who needs nerves when you have an ancient demon coming to claim your soul and drag you to hell in three days time?
“Drag Me To Hell” marks Raimi’s reentrance into a horror genre that he influenced heavily with his “Evil Dead” trilogy. And, lest hardcore horror fans fret over whether or not Raimi’s successful flirtation with mainstream filmmaking with his “Spiderman” films made him soft, “Drag Me To Hell’s” opening sequence dispels those concerns rather quickly and with a terrifying glee that never lets up.
Early in the film, a young couple brings their son to see a mysterious woman (Adriana Barraza) in the hopes that she might rid the child of the frightening images haunting him after he took an object from an old gypsy woman. The clairvoyant is unsuccessful in her task and some unseen force literally drags the young lad through the floor screaming into hell.
The scene is at once fascinating and relentless, one that balances skillfully the horror with the silliness of it all. As the camera lingers on the image of the boy disappearing into screams and floorboards, the young clairvoyant promises that she will face this foe again one day and defeat it.
She gets her chance when a young bank loan officer, Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), learns she is one of the two candidates that her boss is considering for a promotion. In the preceding scene, we learn that Christine is a well-meaning person, helpful towards her bank customers and eager to beat out smarmy suck-up Stu (Reggie Lee). When Ms. Ganish (Lorna Raver), an elderly gypsy woman, sits at Christine’s desk, tapping her fingers methodically on the wood before she asks for her third extension on her mortgage, Christine initially hesitates. The old woman pleads her case and Christine acquiesces, promising the gypsy that she will explain the situation to her boss.
And, here, in her boss’s office, Christine realizes that her ticket to that promotion just might be in denying Ms. Ganish her third extension.
Christine does just that and the old gypsy does not respond too kindly. In fact, Ms. Ganish places a curse on Christine: in three days, an ancient demon will drag Christine, soul intact, to hell.
You have to admire the simplicity and the audacity of “Drag Me To Hell.” It is rather straightforward in its premise and it never fails to deliver the horror goods. Raimi never really gives his audience time to launch a critique of his relevancy to the horror genre, to attack him for making a PG-13 horror film instead of going for the R-rated gory goods. His film is an unremitting one with one scare after another.
Audiences will find little in the way of sloppy attempts to scare them. And, Raimi pulls off this task carefully within the confines of the narrative.
The demon coming to claim Christine’s soul stalks and haunts its victim for three days before the main event, turning shadows into nightmares and blending nightmares into reality. It is with these shadows and nightmares that Raimi plays, every camera move and every edit a possible attack on Christine and the audiences’ already shattered nerves. If the score begins to crescendo, then you can rest assured that a demon attack is imminent. There are no cheap scares or false climaxes because Raimi follows through on nearly all of them.
That, along with some fine performances from a game cast, makes “Drag Me To Hell” easily one of the best PG-13 horror films to come out in quite some time. Lohman and Justin Long, who plays Christine’s long-suffering and understanding boyfriend, turn in some genuinely funny performances. Long has most of the film’s one-liners—unless you, like me, count that demonically possessed goat, one of the many highlights of the film. His performance grounds the film just as Hell unleashes its supernatural shenanigans on his soon-to-be fiancé.
The real fun is with Lohman, however. Bruce Campbell (“Evil Dead” trilogy) she is not but she clearly relishes the role and respects the material. Her smackdowns with Ms. Ganish provide the film with its most memorable and scariest moments in a way that recalls Campbell’s zany—and equally scary—battles with the demons in the first two “Evil Dead” films. You may not approve of her earlier decision to deny Ms. Ganish that loan but Lohman makes Christine empathetic, a necessary task if we are to care about whether she gets dragged to hell or not.
But, the major kudos go to Sam Raimi, an often underrated director whose roots in horror were clearly apparent in the “Spiderman” films (Christopher Young’s cameo score in “Spiderman 2,” anyone?). Here, he exercises considerable control over his outrageous, and weirdly prescient, material. Here, Raimi has given horror fans a reason to breathe a sigh of relief over the current state of the genre. That is, once they regain control of their lungs from all the screams induced by “Drag Me To Hell.”
Grade: A-
