This special double feature (Up and Drag Me to Hell) is a bit dated now, written when the website was still under construction.  Hope you enjoy anyway.

–Duncan

PARADOXICAL DOUBLE FEATURE, Pt. 2: Cartoon Humans

For those benighted souls who are as yet uninitiated, Spider-Man director Sam Raimi began his career with a trilogy of improbably bloody, increasingly comical horror movies known as the Evil Dead.  Moving from a deserted cabin in the woods to the middle ages, Evil Dead combined zombies, the Three Stooges, Bruce Campbell’s chin cleft, and some incredibly inventive low-budget camerawork for a distinct brand of cartoon horror. After going straight, Raimi returns to the genre that gave him his start with Drag Me to Hell.  More than a move towards Raimi’s origins, Drag is billed in trailers everywhere as “the return of true horror”: in the era of saws, hostels, and zombified grit, Raimi is going back to candlelit séances, gravestones that look like Styrofoam, and things that go bump in the night.  The movie even begins with the 1980s Universal logo—a kind of nostalgic traditionalism for anyone raised in the VHS era.

The center of Drag Me to Hell is Christine Brown (Allison Lohman), a kind, vulnerable, but determined young woman with a sweet boyfriend (Justin Long), a job at a bank, and dreams of upward mobility.  While she has her eye on a new promotion—one that requires “tough decisions”—Christine is visited by an old gypsy woman looking for an extension on her mortgage (a bit of timeliness on the movie’s part).  Despite her sympathy, she says no, and the gypsy woman–as fictional gypsies are wont to do–puts a curse on Christine: for three days, she’ll be tormented by the Lamia, a shadowy goat demon from the great beyond (any sarcasm is uncalled for and unnecessary).  When the three days are up, the Lamia will drag Christine to hell “to burn forever” (as hell is wont to do).  Haunted by the Lamia and running out of time, Christine frantically searches for a way to shed the curse.

If I had to sum up the movie—and its success—with two words, I would say “ghoulish enthusiasm.”  Raimi, clearly having more fun with curses and goat demons than 49-year-old men are supposed to, plays with light, shadow, and set pieces with energy and style.  Dividing scenes of exposition with scenes of horror, the scares are wildly imaginative, with no refuge in the laws of reality.  But it’s also offbeat: embracing the ridiculousness of horror fantasy, Raimi’s jolts can make you jump but leave a smile on your face.  Raimi, as Spider-Man shows, excels at creating live-action cartoons without rendering them stiff or losing personality.  Drag Me to Hell would feel at home in the frames of a dark comic book, both in spirit and sentiment.  And in that regard, it’s incredibly successful: both scary and fun, full of macabre wit, taking and sharing a not-so-serious joy in the many mortal threats to men (and kittens).

Before the movie came out, there was a bit of internet outrage when it was announced that Drag Me to Hell would be, horror of horrors, rated a mere PG-13, thus ruling out geysers of fake blood and making it accessible to middle school slumber parties.  But if anything, the rating shows that times have changed since the last Evil Dead movie.  The PG-13, I would assume, is largely a matter of its tone, which is less grisly than most horror these days–but any fears that Raimi toned it down should be quelled sometime around the housefly nightmare, long before the anvil scene, and maybe even by the time Allison Lohman fights off the old crone with a stapler.  Far less fake blood is spilled, but Drag Me to Hell easily rivals Army of Darkness in terms of perversely engaging crimes against nature.  It’s perhaps not quite as horrific as Evil Dead 2, but certainly as grotesque.  In fact, Drag is willfully, well, grosser. Raimi goes for the stomach—things will go into/out of a person’s mouth in this movie that I’m sure you’ve never seen go into/out of a person’s mouth in a movie before—so it often hits the gag reflex more than it raises the pulse. I don’t hesitate at all to say that this is the hardest PG-13 I can think of.

But it should also be noted that the movie succeeds, beyond imaginative scares, because it is also one of the more cohesive, realized, and just plain well-told stories to come out of Hollywood lately. I’m not, perhaps, the movie’s target audience.  I don’t like horror movies as a general rule, and I’m not really fond of gross-out gags (if, as the theory goes, cinema is pleasurable because the act of watching carries some sort of psychoanalytic joy, I doubt that watching an old woman vomit worms onto Allison Lohman is what they had in mind).  But the story easily pulled me in: it’s wonderfully paced and structured, characters are established and engaging.  Even the non-horror scenes—the bank, the psychic, the parents—are well-written, quite funny, and relatably human, with a more horror-oriented version of the gee-whiz heart and soul that powered Spider-Man.

I find the ending interesting and worthy of discussion, but spoilers will be involved.  For thoughts on the ending, anyone who’s seen the movie and doesn’t mind can direct their attention to the spoiler zone below.  But I can leave off here for now and say that, to my non-horror-loving self, I found the movie just short of a total, transcendent cinematic experience: a mostly-full recommendation.  Feel free to add another star if horror is your bag…

4 out of 5 stars.

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At the end of the film, Christine sheds the curse, or so she thinks.  She meets her boyfriend, the aforementioned Justin Long, to celebrate the shedding of the curse.  They hug.  In his arms, she confesses to denying the mortgage, and he says that she has a good heart.  The sun is shining, and for the first time there’s not a trace of anything ominous in the air.  And then, due to a mix-up, the earth opens up, and Christine is, well, dragged to hell.  Cut to a tear on Justin Long’s face, smash cut to the ending title card.

And I find it curious.

The ending is well set up and executed, and its bluntness is certainly to be admired.  But at the same time, it also felt bluntly pointless, with little moral or thematic resonance. Christine, it seemed to me, had learned her lesson, if she ever needed to in the first place (I don’t buy any argument that she deserved it).  In that case, the story is a tragedy: punishment for someone who deserves the opposite.  Except the movie barely reflects on it as such.  It hangs for that moment on Justin Long’s tears, but ultimately, it somehow hints at reflection while discouraging it at the same time.

Of course, ending on a surprise downer note is nothing new for Raimi, as anyone who sought out Evil Dead 2 or the Army of Darkness director’s cut knows well.  But differences are crucial.  Unlike Evil Dead’s Ash, who was more of a cartoon punching bag, Christine is vulnerable and empathetically human—Raimi gives us an unusually vested interested in her turning out ok.  Also, Ash ended up in an arguably worse situation, but one that conceivably had a way out.  Christine’s fate, on the other hand, has finality to it, and the way the movie handles that finality struck me as odd.  Raimi’s affection for his characters is generally strong, but as it jumps for the final “boo!”, Drag doesn’t seem particularly concerned that a good-hearted person spending an eternity in hell might spoil the movie’s fun.  It didn’t spoil mine—don’t get me wrong—but it makes me interested in what that says.

The feeling I get about horror movies is that the director and the audience are (usually) in league against the characters on screen.  To that effect, the ending raises the question of whether we were supposed to root for Christine, as a person, or get our own ghoulish thrills and chills as she hung in the balance.  If we are supposed to care, do people see the movie as a downer?  The almost certain explanation is that it’s not supposed to be taken that seriously.  But if so, does it build up its characters only to cheapen them?  The macabre joy of an unhappy fate is hardly new—just resurrect and ask Hitchcock—but if you make the character too innocent, does it work?

I suppose that’s a question for horror movie theorists.  I’ll just say that it’s a well-told story and a fantastically fun ride: like a carnival haunted house, no lingering horror, but plenty of memorable kicks and screams.