So we come full circle at last. Thirty films ago we kicked
the chapter off with a look at Raimi’s Evil Dead, now here we are looking at
his latest horror film Drag Me To Hell. I tried to limit things here to one
film per filmmaker, but I make an exception here given that A) I like the
symmetry. B) Raimi remains one of my favorite filmmakers, not to mention the
most influential on me. C) Drag Me To Hell is one of the finest examples of
“fun” horror the decade produced and most importantly D) I couldn’t let Wes
Craven be the only director to get two films into these chapters.
Drag Me To Hell works so well because you underestimate
Raimi so thoroughly. Because after three Spiderman movies and two decades
working in the studio system you think he’s gone soft. You try and get ahead of
the movie and go, “Aha so that’s how he’s going to get out of it.” Sure it was
pretty ballsy to open a movie with a little kid being dragged to hell, but on
further reflection it’s a movie called Drag Me To Hell, someone has gotta get
dragged to hell or people will want their money back, really that’s just Raimi
getting it out of the way. As soon as it was established that Christine was
willing to sacrifice others in place of herself, as soon as it was established
that there were two round objects in similar envelops, I knew, not thought, knew, that Raimi was going to let her out of it and give
her nice supportive boyfriend the ticket to the infernal instead. Because I knew, once again knew, that whatever was about to happen Sam Raimi was not
about to send this poor, likable, tough, moral girl to hell. Not after all she
had been through.
Spoiler Alert, he does. And it’s awful.
But I do believe we’re getting ahead of ourselves, no good
jumping ahead in the steps though with such an ending it is hard not to. Drag
Me To Hell was Sam Raimi’s return to (relatively) low budget filmmaking after
serving as steward for Sony’s uber blockbuster Spiderman series. Though Raimi’s
affection for the character never made the films feel less than personal and he
was able to smuggle in a fair amount of his idiosyncratic personality, humor
and stylistic virtuosity, by the end of the third film it was clear that Raimi
was ready for a change. While not the disaster that many like to tar it as, Spiderman
3 was a film that desperately lacked focus.
Drag Me To Hell on the other hand is nothing but focus. A
merciless wave of narrative momentum and high energy set pieces driving towards
the impact of that awful final moment. It’s a film without an ounce of fat on
it. As streamlined and vicious as the unseen force in Evil Dead.
Drag Me To Hell follows Christine, a loan officer whose
problems are starting to mount. One of the most underrated things about the
film is just how much time and care it takes with these pre supernatural
sequences. After the opening, which is basically Raimi throwing some raw meat
at the crocodiles to shut them up, Raimi takes his time putting the screws to
Christine, ratcheting up her own insecurities, her difficulty being excepted
into her would be fiance’s family, her being boxed out of a deserved promotion
by her incredibly passive aggressive coworker. By the time Raimi is ready to
take things to the next level the viewer is just as tense, worn and frustrated
as Christine is when she sits down with Sylvia Ganush.
And my God what a crone she is! Wretched and ancient
looking, thieving, manipulative, Raimi brings the full force of his
considerable sick sense of humor to bear in the scene (I picture he and brother
Ivan laughing hysterically over the line “But then the sickness took my eye”).
In many ways it’s the key scene in the movie, if you don’t buy that this woman
would send someone to eternal damnation for hurting her pride you don’t buy
anything else that happens in the
film. You buy it.
The next scene in which Christine is actually cursed is
where the film really takes off. Making this film was a genuine risk for Raimi.
He basically had a perfect record as a horror director, films that were defined
by their high, almost frenzied energy. The sort of creative energy isn’t
something that everyone can keep
up and nobody wants to watch Sam Raimi make his own Diary Of The Dead.
Any worries that Raimi no longer had what it takes are blown away by this
sequence, a piece of close combat inside a car that just. Keeps. Going. Every
time you convince yourself that things can get no bigger and crazier it tops
itself, by the time Sylvia Ganush is gumming Christine’s Jaw you might believe
the apex of mayhem has been reached. You would be wrong. It feels like
something that Raimi could have
shot the day after finishing
Principle Photography on Evil Dead 2.
The ingenious thing about it is the way that Raimi manages
to keep things relatively grounded. The violence is comical and over the top
yes, but it is also intense and genuinely upsetting in away that Raimi hasn’t
really gone for since the original Evil Dead. It’s splatstick, but it’s also a
vicious assault. Though Christine’s Midwestern pragmatism and back bone allows
her to basically role with the supernatural threat and she proves herself
capable of taking hits that would make Bruce Campbell flinch (One of the film’s
running gags is the ever worse things that end up in Christine’s Mouth, from
Formhaldye gushing from a corpse to half of a decaying arm) she’s a very human
heroine at the end of the day.
It would be one thing if this was just an isolated sequence
but the remarkable thing is that Raimi is able to keep this difficult balance
of tone throughout the entire film. Displaying the same amount energy and
infernal ingenuity again and again. Drag Me To Hell may be PG 13 but it’s more
intense than most Horror films that bear the R Rating.
Christine ends the encounter with Ms. Ganush cursed, haunted
by the demon Lamnia, who after three days of earthly torment will drag
Christine to hell. Raimi just turns the screws tighter and tighter, as
Christine tries not only to rid herself of the curse, but keep a calm façade as
it intrudes into her life, hard to do when you end up drenching your boss with
blood from your nose (“Did I get any in my mouth?” the stunned man asks in a
great Raimi line) and facing horrific visions in the food when meeting your
boyfriend’s parents for the first time (In a typical Raimi touch, his
surprising humanism gets the better of him and he allows the stereotypical strident
would be mother in law to warm to Christine. It’s both a move typical of
Raimi’s generosity with character and an extra bit of sadism. It’s one thing
when things go wrong. Another when they could have gone right.)
She enlists the aid of Rham Das (the great Dileep Rao) a
mystic and her skeptical boyfriend, neither of whom is of much ultimate help,
but as her options for driving away the Lamnia dwindle, desperation grows.
Climaxing in a séance scene that is as fantastic a depiction of comic chaos as
anything in the Evil Dead films and features what I can confidently say is the
greatest animatronics goat of all time.
In addition to his own splatterpunk past, Raimi draws on the
Universal era of horror (a side trip to a gypsy funeral that turns blackly comic)
and other sources (Jacques Tournier’s superlative Curse Of The Demon is an
acknowledged influence). Though blackly comic and anarchic, the film creates an
atmosphere that is genuinely oppressive, as Martin Scorsese said of film noir, “No
matter which way you go, fate sticks out its foot to trip you.” As I said
before it does at the film’s climax in the ultimate way.
It feels wrong, not like a cheat, the film earns it, but
like an implicate contract has been broken. But that at the end is what makes
horror such a violate genre. You can never let your defenses down around it.
Even a piece of fun horror may turn around and sink its fangs to you without
warning.
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