When Drag Me to Hell was made, an unbelievable decade ago, it did one thing straight away: it delivered director and writer Sam Raimi back into the eager grasp of a multitude of genre film fans. An Evil Dead remake may have been floating around at the rumour stage by roughly this point in time, but Raimi himself hadn’t worked on an honest-to-goodness horror since Army of Darkness set the seal on his perfect marriage of grisly and silly. He had, to all intents and purposes, moved on: the Spider-Man movies were a different world, being big-budget, big studio affairs. Now, these films make solid commercial and career sense, and there’s nothing exactly wrong with them per se, but perhaps it all felt a little clean and tidy to the people who’d cut their teeth on The Evil Dead. Drag Me To Hell promised a welcome return to that particular form, and it was exciting, something to look forward to. Looking back and revisiting the film now, even the opening credits would do any horror fan the power of good. It’s a fun film from the very start, full of a blur of shlock horror components – a gypsy curse, together with monsters, psychics, graveyards and strange ‘should I be laughing at this?’ rituals. Even Hell itself seems somehow OTT in this film, and that’s a place which has a rich cultural history of shlock.
So all the prerequisite elements are clearly there, all present and correct. Drag Me To Hell is terrific fun. But it does have a nasty edge to it, for all that, when you think about it. Does Christine really deserve everything she gets, for not extending a loan? Are we not encouraged to empathise with her? – She’s clearly not a character we’re meant to hate, and the film would be a failure, in all likelihood, if we just saw a dreadful person get punished across ninety minutes. Instead, Christine (Alison Lohman) is a girl desperately trying to escape her provincial background and better herself. It’s the American Dream – get somewhere, be someone. But long before the shit hits the fan, her American Dream is clearly being knocked from all sides – her boss, her co-worker, her boyfriend’s family. None of them want her to get ahead. It’s a bad day at the office, and then Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) turns up, asking for another extension on her mortgage payments. She’s already had several. Should Christine have extended her more credit? Possibly, but then she’s doing her best in a tough professional environment. Maybe Mrs Ganush should have cursed someone higher up. Come to think of it, weren’t we in the throes of a banking crisis at this time?
But hey, it is what it is: dreadful curses happen to good people, that’s the real lesson here. A vulnerable old woman turns out to be a menacing old witch (Raimi always does stellar work making old age seem more monstrous than frail) and Christine has the obligatory three days to save her soul. They’re not a nice, peaceful, relish-your-last-hours three days, either. One of the film’s strengths is in how it creates a mash-up of occult phenomena, forging a familiar-but-different mythology. The ‘lamia’ invoked by Mrs Ganush is a figure from Greek myth and legend, usually imagined as female – but our lamia walks with cloven feet, like a good old fashioned incarnation of Satan. The ‘cursed object’ idea feels like another borrowing, but altogether, it works well. It certainly lends itself to another key Raimi genre film feature: the gore. Oh the gore.
I think if I were to sum up Raimi’s style of on-screen gore, I’d call it something like ‘wonderfully nauseating’. Splatter which feels like an old friend. And there is abundant splatter here: even a straightforward nosebleed turns into a dousing; Mrs Ganush’s superpower seems to be emitting disgusting fluids, in life and in death, and she gives the film a lot of its gross-out-loud moments. Blood and vomit slosh around against a raucous soundtrack for the most part, too, lending the film a sense of sensory overload. But there’s a lot more classic Raimi here: the camera which operates from a ghoul’s-eye-view, pursuing characters along the street; the unseen presence pin-balling around any available space, destroying everything as it goes; the host of demons which have a strange joie de vivre, gurning and laughing as they go. Even the assaults on the main character feel like essential Raimi directing, and Christine is thrown around like a ragdoll just as much as Bruce Campbell was in the Evil Dead trilogy (and, yeah, it’s hard not to draw that comparison: two everyday people accidentally pitched against demonic forces which take a real pleasure in their work. It’s also not lost on me that the first trip Christine and boyfriend Clay (Justin Long) plan to take is to…a cabin in the woods!)
Now, for all of that, Drag Me To Hell isn’t a perfect film – there’s no sense pretending it is – and there are a few weak points along the way. Some of the sticking points for me would doubtlessly include the ubiquitous ‘family dinner’ which just invites you to squirm at the inevitable embarrassment to come. Christine goes through enough, without a baking disaster in front of the prospective in-laws. And I would say that the expendable psychic is one trope too many; you know damn well that if you see one, then their number’s up once they’ve passed on just enough information about the other world. The jury’s out on the seance scene, some fans were turned off by it, but I think I’m still erring towards the side of ‘hahaha, talking goat, cool’. But perhaps the thing which has aged most poorly over the past ten years is the CGI. Now, this is always a topic which divides people, but it’s clear to see how far the technology has come in the last decade, even if you’re not generally a fan of these effects. Even if the CGI in Drag Me To Hell occurs in some of the most cartoonish scenes in the film – someone gets an anvil in the back of the head, Wile E. Coyote style – it still jars somewhat, and looks a little out of place; it did then, so it really does now. But, hey, you can’t have it all…and for the film’s final scenes, you’d forgive a hell of a lot anyway. A sequence of false endings give way to a final jolt as the plot reveals its big cruel joke on Christine and then, after all hell breaks loose, there’s a cut to the final credits. Done. Lamia 1: Christine 0.
So, looking back now after ten years have gone by, Drag Me To Hell feels like a worthwhile return to form, and it may be slightly odd to say (you get slightly odd after decades of horror cinema) it’s one of those films I can always put on and enjoy. But at the time, it was perhaps more valued as it was a ‘hello again, goodbye again’ from Sam Raimi, as he went back to more mainstream fare – that is, until the glorious Evil Dead TV series gave us more of the same, and what a joy that was. But we’re bang up to date, almost, when talking about the TV incarnation. Drag Me To Hell was, in 2009, a welcome dose of demons and gore at a time when horror was saturated with found footage and torture porn: how nice it was, and is, to have a film which balanced the humorous with the gruesome, and held the camera still. What’s not to love? People fretting over whether the film is meant to be scary or funny are missing the point. This is a Sam Raimi horror. It’s both, duh.