“So, you wish to know something of your destiny.”
Few directors get the same joy out of tormenting their characters as Sam Raimi does. His Evil Dead trilogy amounts to three glorious hours of him shitting all over Bruce Campbell, and his wonderful, horrible film A Simple Plan twists the screws so tightly and so relentlessly on Bill Paxton that it becomes impossible to watch or look away from. Raimi’s 2009 Drag Me to Hell is a terrific return to film, sandwiched between soulless blockbusters like Spider-Man 3 and Oz the Great and Powerful. This is a go-for-broke film that never gives its heroine a single break; it’s hard to look away from, and even harder to look at, because this is one of the grossest Hollywood films in recent memory.
Drag Me to Hell exists in a B-movie universe where psychics are legitimate and Gypsy curses are as real as they are unstoppable. This is made clear in its jaw-dropping opening, when a Mexican family goes to visit a medium named Shaun San Dena in Pasadena, explaining that their son stole a necklace from a Gypsy’s wagon and is now being plagued by demonic voices. Despite her best efforts, San Dena is unable to stop the demon stalking the child – a lamia – and a kid who can’t be more than ten or eleven is dragged down into fire, through a portal freshly opened in the foyer. That’s how this damn movie starts. It’s a bold move, but it would be so much sturm und drang if Raimi couldn’t follow it.
The film follows Christine Brown (a terrific Alison Lohman, who stepped in for Ellen Page after Page left to film Whip It), a loan officer hungry for a promotion to assistant manager. In 2009, it was easy to make bankers the villains, because, well, they were (and still are, let’s not kid ourselves). But Christine is so likable that Raimi is actually able to humanize a member of the most despised group on the planet at that time.
Christine is a good person who does a shitty thing. Under pressure from her boss, and facing competition from a backstabbing coworker, she needs to look tough. She refuses a mortgage extension for Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver), an old Gypsy woman with a milky eye who, in the film’s first shot of disgusting bodily expulsion, coughs up yellow phlegm into an old handkerchief.
This is as good a time as any to bring up the fact that Drag Me to Hell is an absolutely disgusting film. But there’s an art to it; Raimi isn’t falling back on numerous bodily fluids because he has other tricks in his bag. Throughout the film, Christine’s mouth will be filled with blood, bile, eyes, insects, even most of an arm. Most of these turn out to be hallucinations or dreams, which just adds to the film’s presentation of a crumbling reality, one where what is on our insides is never that far from being on the outside.
The movie is more or less episodic in nature, but that works to its advantages, as Christine endures one horrible ordeal after another. First she’s attacked in the parking garage by Mrs. Ganush, who waits for her in her car and intones, “You shamed me.” The fight takes place almost entirely within Christine’s car, and it’s a classic Raimi fight, reminiscent of the great cabin sequences in Evil Dead, wherein combatants who aren’t used to physical combat use whatever weapons they have at their disposal. What Drag Me to Hell does so nicely is refuse to gloss over the attack’s aftermath, the way most movies would. Christine is shaken and traumatized, and it adds nice layers to Lohman’s performance (and Justin Long’s, who plays her boyfriend).
Drag Me to Hell is one climax after another – this film lives cranked up to eleven. There are almost no lulls, no time for the audience to rest. There’s the ominous tension of Christine’s psychic reading by Rham Jas (a delightful Dileep Rao), who tells her plainly, “Maybe someone has cursed you.” Then Christine is alone in the house when she’s attacked by the lamia. Then she’s at work and blood is spraying out of her nose and mouth. Somewhere around here the film hits the half-hour mark.
This isn’t for the squeamish, or gore-averse. Raimi stretches his PG-13 rating to its absolute breaking point. To put it in the most juvenile terms possible, Drag Me to Hell is a kick-ass splatterfest that you can only watch through your hands. There’s a sense of authorship about all the violence and depravity, one missing from soulless torture porn like Hostel or Captivity. Watching Drag gives you a sense that the guys who made The Evil Dead has gotten the band back together (Raimi wrote both films with his brother Ivan).
The performances are pretty terrific across the board. Raver finds the humanity in what could have been a ghoulish monstrosity of a woman; one of the film’s most quietly shocking shots is when Mrs. Ganush drops to her knees in the bank to beg Christine to help her. Rao, as compulsively watchable here as he is in Inception, is saddled with a lot of exposition, but he’s so likable that his performance makes you feel like you’re just having a conversation with a friend who has a weird breadth of knowledge. Justin Long is fine in an underwritten role; the only real weak link here is Reggie Lee, Christine’s unscrupulous coworker at the bank.
Drag Me to Hell ends the only way it can, in an ever-increasing crescendo of violence and insanity. The seance is harrowing enough, with its terrifying talking goat, but Raimi knows he has to top himself, and that this film doesn’t warrant a happy ending. In a sense, a lot of horror builds to a punchline, and Drag is no different. A portal to hell opens on a train track, demonic hands reach through and grab Christine, and her face is already turning skeletal before she’s completely gone. Cut to title card. It’s audacious, and bold, and while we don’t always get the old Raimi, Drag Me to Hell shows us that he never really left.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead
10/2: Drag Me to Hell
10/3: Pet Sematary
10/4: The Descent
10/5: Repo! The Genetic Opera
10/6: Desierto
10/7: The Blair Witch Project
10/8: Blair Witch
10/9: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
10/10: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
10/11: Prince of Darkness
10/12: 30 Days of Night
10/13: Friday the 13th (2009)
10/14: Slither
10/15: Tremors
10/16: Pandorum
10/17: It Follows
10/18: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
10/19: Poltergeist
10/20: Paranormal Activity
10/21: Creepshow
10/22: VHS
10/23: Nosferatu the Vampyre
10/24: An American Werewolf in London
10/25: The Witch
10/26: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
10/27: Cronos
10/28: The Hills Have Eyes
10/29: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
10/30: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
10/31: Halloween (2007)
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