Hex And The Single Girl

Here’s why Sam Raimi is a genius.

There’s a scene in Drag Me to Hell where Alison Lohman is being attacked by a crazed elderly gypsy woman in a garden shed. They’re wrestling, trading blows, tearing out each other’s hair, and now it looks like the gypsy woman finally has the upper hand: she’s got Lohman pinned against the wall, her hand on Lohman’s throat, her bony fingers tightening their grip, choking off the last bit of air to Lohman’s lung. But then, Lohman notices a rope knotted around a wooden beam just within arm’s reach — and with just two or three efficient zip pans, Raimi shows us that the rope is holding up an anvil — an anvil! — hanging from the ceiling, right above the gypsy woman’s head. When I saw Drag Me to Hell, the entire audience laughed with delight at that shot. Sam Raimi must be the only live-action director who’ll actually show a character taking an anvil to the head.

But wait: that’s not the genius part. The genius part is that when the anvil hits the gypsy woman’s skull, her eyeballs fly out of their sockets, stretching out as far as their stalks will allow them, while a couple of gallons of black, foul-looking goop spews from the holes onto Lohman’s face. The audience roared.

And so it goes with Drag Me to Hell, a ridiculous, unabashedly entertaining horror romp in which the laughs and the screams are just about indistinguishable from one another. Aside from The Quick and the Dead, it’s Raimi’s only film with a female protagonist, loan officer Christine Brown (Lohman), who has forgotten one of the cardinal rules of horror movies: never get crazy old gypsy women mad at you — especially not crazy old gypsy women with one eye and snaggly teeth and a headful of malevolent hexes like Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver). When Christine refuses to extend her an extension on her mortgage, Mrs. Ganush lays the ancient gypsy curse of the lamia upon her: for the next three days, Christine will be tormented mercilessly by an evil spirit, after which the ground will open and she’ll be... well, read the title.

But that plot is merely a springboard for a series of rollicking setpieces in which Lohman is assaulted by invisible forces, has houseflies crawl up her nostrils, suffocated by a sentient handkerchief, and, in one memorable scene, insulted by a talking goat. Raimi stages these scenes with an impish showmanship that’s impossible to resist — you can practically hear him cackling behind the camera each time that damn gypsy woman leaps out at Lohman from some unexpected place and everyone in the theatre gets startled upright. That may sound no different from the sneak-up-behind-you-and-say-boo! tactics of dozens of hack horror directors, but Raimi’s scares are always staged with an extra bit of cinematic flair, some playful slapstick twist, that leaves you feeling giddy instead of merely tricked. Let me put it this way: Christine owns a pet kitten, but Raimi has a much better use in mind for it than a mere “cat scare.”

There’s certainly nothing deep about Drag Me to Hell (except for the grave that Christine winds up at the bottom of in one scene), but who wants their summer movies to be profound? See it with as big a crowd as you can round up, and watch out overhead for falling anvils.