Drag Me to Hell (2009)

It’s very hard not to read this film as a parody. Yet nowhere outside the film’s title is there anything to suggest that this isn’t a horror film that takes itself seriously. But, if we can look to the ultimate entry in Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, we see the stage for supernatural horror comedy had been set years before.

Drag Me to Hell moves to the modern context and switches to a female protagonist vying for a promotion at her trivial bank job. Her competition and boss, both male, are obtrusively ignorant and traditionally one-dimensional. Even her boyfriend, whose presence is interjected purely for narrative continuity, cannot even manage a convincing sympathy or concern for his girlfriends newly acquired curse. Per usual, then, the woman because the target for torture, a good deal of which manages to find its way into her mouth. Here is a short and incomplete list: a fly, mealworms, vomit, blood, handkerchief, and eyeballs. This film does manage to take extreme advantage of propelling disgusting content onto the face of its doomed heroine. Appropriately, the visceral and repulsive materials mark a sharp contrast to the neatly tidy and not unattractive actress whose screams come at almost consistent intervals throughout the entirety of the movie.

The opening titles suggest a classic horror film of decades past. Yet the clean cinematography marks a sharp contrast to the grainy (read: low budget) splatter fests of yesteryear. Throw in the distracting amounts of cheesy computer effects that make their presence known minutes into the film and it is marked as a modern piece of filmmaking. Thus it is hard to see Raimi’s film as anything but a gross exaggeration of the jaw-dropping horror fans flock to see. No one will question why the anvil was hanging on a pulley when the rope is then cut with an ice-skate and gravity forces the old gypsy’s eyes out of her head and onto the girl’s face.

Of course, I’d rather step down from my hypercritical pedestal for a moment and commend the film for the consistency with which it delivers scare tactics, a fact that certainly doesn't refute my preferred reading of the film. If I, or anyone, had a nickel for every time something popped out with intent to scare then we would have dollars, dollars. The film manages to take all these moments, many absurd, none scary, and keep the audience tense and expectant for much of the running time. The fact that on numerous occasions they involve vomitous, explosive bodily fluids and audibly enhanced grotesquery makes their infusion often satisfying. The film was not that entertaining, but for many (read: everyone I talked to) it was a successful and cinematically rewarding experience.