Original Sin

Film: Drag Me to Hell
Format: DVD from personal collection on basement television.

Sam Raimi wants you to know that he’s not playing and Drag Me to Hell is serious. It’s not easy to make a genuinely scary horror movie with a rating lower than R, but Raimi pulls out as many of the stops as he can to give genuine scares in a PG-13 movie. In the first couple of minutes, we meet a young boy who feels as if he is being pursued by a dangerous entity. It turns out that he stole a necklace from a Romani cart. Moments later, we see the young boy literally dragged to Hell—this is a kid, maybe about 10, being dragged down to eternal, unending torture for that crime.

Jump to the film’s present, and we’re introduced to Christine Brown (Alison Lohman, in one of her last major roles before she effectively retired from acting), a loan officer at a bank. Christine is in competition with coworker Stu Rubin (Reggie Lee) for an assistant manager position, and Stu seems to be in the lead, thanks in large part to his ruthlessness. Wanting that promotion and everything that comes with it, Christine decides to be more aggressive herself, and denies an extension to Sylvia Ganush (Lorna Raver), an old Romani woman who has fallen behind on her loan payments. Offended by this and humiliated, the old woman attacks Christine, something that is repeated much more violently in the parking lot at the end of the day. The upshot of this is that Christine finds herself the subject of a curse placed on her. After three days of torment, a spirit called Lamia will drag her down to Hell.

She’s going to start seeing some terrible things, and is going to be visited by what feels like terrible spirits. Worse, when she goes to beg for forgiveness, she finds that Sylvia Ganush has died. None of this will impress her boyfriend Clay (Justin Long, who kind of feels miscast as a professor), who finds the idea of curses a bit ridiculous. A visit to a fortune teller named Rham Jas (Dileep Rao) starts Christine looking for a way to eliminate the curse. Sacrificing her cat doesn’t work, and as she gets more desperate, she eventually decides to seek the help of a woman named Shaun San Dena (Adriana Barraza), a oman who faced the curse before, and in fact was present in the opening scene when the young boy was taken.

What we’re going to eventually find out is that the curse that Christine is carrying is connected to a button from her coat, one that Sylvia seems to have cursed directly and specifically. What she learns is that if she gives that button that carries the curse to another person, the curse will transfer to that person as well. So, if Christine gives the button to anyone, that person inherits the curse and gets taken to Hell in her place.

A great deal of what makes Drag Me to Hell work is the fact that Sam Raimi is and always has essentially been an interesting horror director. There are a lot of his hallmarks in this film. Camera angles and camera movement are pure Raimi, doing exactly what he did in the original Evil Dead movies, but to better effect now.

A lot of what makes Drag Me to Hell really work is that it feels like a slow slide into madness. Christine is clearly being stalked by something that doesn’t feel like a part of the real world, and frequently, only she is able to see what is happening. There are some wonderful moments of surreality, like the dinner she has with Clay’s parents. She finds herself having a coughing fit and suddenly coughs up a living fly. It’s such a weird moment, one that feels horrifying and sinister, and yet almost entirely relatable in a strange way.

Where the film breaks down is the theology. This tends to be the case in a lot of movies that involve Hell and damnation of any sort. Films like the Hellraiser series get around it by presenting creatures like the Cenobites not as demons, but as simply demonic and cruel, not caring about the guilt or innocence of their victims. But in Drag Me to Hell, we are presented with a world with what is essentially the Christian Hell, and in this world, people are able to damn others to eternal punishment regardless of their innocence. Imagine living in a world where Hell actually exists, and after a lifetime of good works, service, and devotion, you can be sent to Hell because someone hands you a button.

There’s a great deal to like about Drag Me to Hell, but it does feel needlessly cruel. I don’t take issue with horror movies, but there does seem to me to need to be at least a sense of fairness to them. Drag Me to Hell presents an unfair world, and that does hurt it a bit in my estimation.

Why to watch Drag Me to Hell: Sam Raimi is an innovative horror director.
Why not to watch: This is some weird-ass theology.