Drag Me to Hell

Drag Me to Hell - director Sam Raimi's highly anticipated return to horror - explodes onto the screen in very fine form. In a nod to older works (including his own Evil Dead franchise), Raimi opens with a vintage Universal logo as a stylistic and tonal indicator. This is a an adrenaline fueled roller coaster ride of a horror piece that is committed to hard scares and good fun and has absolutely nothing (NOTHING) to do with tourists who get lost in Europe and end up having viking milkmaids skin them alive to drink their blood. It is truly of a different, pre-Saw and even pre-Scream era in which sadistic torture and ultra-ironic audience nods are altogether out of the equation. Point of order: Sam Raimi and brother Ivan penned the script in 1993 and then shelved it for all these years. Thankfully, the piece was not lost completely. Drag Me to Hell is some of the most masterful pulp of this or any decade and bears no shame for its commitment to a passe style. In fact, if all is right in the world, Drag Me to Hell will make what is old new again. I'd gladly see a dozen more Raimi-like low-camp high-chill romps than any number of Hostel-like abuse tomes.

The film's story is simple. Wonderfully simple. So simple that you bask in its simplicity and find yourself wondering why other films feel so compelled to muddy their collective narrative waters. Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a good girl. A Southern belle even. One who lived on a humble farm working her humble fields and living a humble life until the universe threw her a curveball and she escaped to the city where she now works as a bank loans officer, ever self-conscious of her less than urban chic past (we meet her practicing her vowel sounds in a mirror and eliminating ever last trace of that drawl). She is dating a very affluent and intellectual professor (Mr. Mac himself, Justin Long) who is her polar opposite and whose judgmental parents she has yet to win over, as she offers him no social mobility. By the wild whimsy of fate, Christine ends up responsible for the claim of the very old and very decrepit Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) who wants a third extension on an already well overdue loan. In order to appease her vindictive boss, who holds the possibility of a promotion over her head, Christine turns the woman down as a means of showing that she is no pushover. Unfortunately, Mrs. Ganush is really a crazy gypsy hag and she places a deadly curse on Christine, one that leaves her to be plagued by a demon for 3 days and subsequently dragged into the depths of hell for eternity. Simple, really.

Raimi owes much of the film's success to cinematographer Peter Deming as well as the expert sound and production design crews. I've always believed horror, more than any genre, depends on the atmosphere setting elements of sound and lighting to achieve maximum effect. Yet the genre's status as a low cinema form tends to saddle it with the lowest of the low in talent and cheap hacks. It takes a combination of cinematography, set design, and sound design to make a vacant parking lot authentically creepy as opposed to just another horror movie cliche. Ditto for the sound of a creaking gate, or the shriek of an off-screen cat. What would be cheese in most features, plays here to surprisingly strong results. It its one of the most cleverly produced horror features I have ever seen, most notably the bustling, clanking, and genuinely unnerving sound mix which does the most work to keep the audience on its toes.

That's not to say that Raimi doesn't have his hand in the proceedings. He puts his stamp all over the film. Not for the humorless or the queasy, Drag Me to Hell specializes in gross out stunts and darkly funny scares. Raimi's preoccupation with bodily fluids touches almost every scene, occasionally too much so. So too does his very uncompromised sense of the demonic. In a horror landscape marked mostly by teen slashers and unfriendly ghosts, Raimi stokes the fire of truly dark and satanic subjects not touched by a Hollywood horror film in years.

His visual style depends partly on participating in cliche and elsewhere inverting the expected. In one his most masterful sequences, Raimi places Christine in a dark house. First comes the initial suspense of her probing its shadowy halls. Then a creaking sound. A slow tracking shot as Christine investigates. The typical false alarm front gate blowing in the wind. It takes only a second following this release of tension for Raimi to break the stillness with the rush of actual demon-shaped shadow creatures and the rattle of pots and pans as they get torn from their shelves by a vicious intruder. Like an emergency alarm of fire bell, the house is now the sight of catastrophe and adrenaline flows. This is only the beginning of the sequence. More developed horror is to follow.

Excusing the slightly juvenile sense of gross-out glee and a twist-ending that can be seen from a mile away, Drag Me to Hell is an absolutely perfect Summer treat. It's scary, complete fun, and genuinely unpredictable (the rarest of words to be associated with commercial Summer cinema). It takes no time at all to getting going and once it starts it never stops. Truly the best American horror film since The Sixth Sense.

Grade: A