Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi, 2009)

There’s no escaping this curse…

Christine is up for a promotion at work. She’s a loan officer at a bank and, in an effort to impress her boss and prove that she’s got what it takes to make the hard decisions, she cruelly denies a mortgage extension to an infirm Romani woman — essentially evicting her despite her frail state.

Christine tries to justify her actions to both herself and the elderly Mrs. Ganush by saying that she was just doing her job. (No doubt that rationalization has only become more poignant in the years since Drag Me to Hell was released — given the current state of American capitalism run amok, ever-increasingly disparate wealth inequality, and the general hellscape perpetuated by people just doing their job, that hollow justification is much harder to swallow.)

Unfortunately for Christine, Ganush doesn’t merely rage against the machine — she targets Christine specifically: she is the personification of the bank that has booted her to the curb. And not unfairly, as Christine herself later admits that she could easily have given her another extension. Except she wanted to be personally rewarded. God, capitalism sucks.

Ganush initially attacks Christine in a deserted parking garage in a virtuoso sequence of raw violence that is devilishly wicked. And then she places a curse on Christine — a curse, we later learn, which involves her being increasingly tormented by a Lamia goat demon for three days, at the end of which she will be literally dragged to Hell. No backsies.

Over the next few days, Christine endures multiple visits from the Lamia. She is terrified. She is attacked. She feels like she is losing her mind — certain that she is in grave danger from something horrific that shouldn’t exist in the too real world of car payments, rent, and 401ks.

Desperate to make sense of what is happening to her, Christine seeks help from a spiritual advisor. She scarifies her pet kitten in an effort to appease the Lamia. She participates in a séance. She tries to transfer the curse to someone else (top of her list: her competition for the promotion). But in selling her soul to the man, Christine has in effect done exactly that. She’s sold her soul. She has exactly zero of redemption.

Drag Me to Hell is a blatant critique of modern capitalistic exploitation: Christine’s problem is the direct consequence of her causing someone economic harm in order to benefit financially herself. Later, her dwindling hope for salvation is reduced to a medium who has prior experience dealing with this Lamia — but only if Christine can come up with $10,000 within a matter of hours. (She tries to, by selling crates of her prized possessions. But the pawn store owner senses her desperation and severely undercuts her asking price.)

But as thinly veiled as the film’s scathing social commentary is, it’s perfectly easy to focus purely on the horror story at hand and have a rollicking good time. Drag Me to Hell is one of the genuinely scarier PG-13 horror movies out there. I’ve no doubt that had I seen this film at a more tender age, there are certain scenes that would have certainly creeped me out. As the grumpy old man in training I now am, and with considerably more horror experience under my belt, it was less so — but still thoroughly impressive.

This is a slick, CGI-heavy, mainstream horror movie complete with a bombastic score that could have been ripped straight out of a comic book hero film. Darker, meaner, and more nihilistic than you’d expect, I found Drag Me to Hell to be both intelligent and an awful lot of horror-oriented fun.

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