I don’t think Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell is as forgotten as Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners. Of course, it was also made nearly 20 years more recently. And in any case, I also don’t think it’s reputation remotely matches its worth. It’s not a perfect film, and the worst aspect is that you can see the set-up for the ending coming miles off. Even so, this is one of the great recent movies featuring a rather traditional evil witch. It is a riff on MR James’ Casting the Runes which gives it a very solid foundation, much like the classic Curse of the Demon.
The only bad taste I ever had regarding the film was a extremely weird statement Raimi made at the time. Having written the film, he opined that the heroine deserved to be threatened with not just being killed but being literally, well, dragged to Hell.* Her crime apparently was that she was “mean” and denied an extremely evil old woman who had rooked the bank holding her mortgage over and over again, and the heroine chose to *gasp* finally hold the woman to the terms of the mortgage agreement (after her boss threatened to fire her if she didn’t). This smacks of someone speaking who has so much money that they don’t understand that basically stealing from a bank is itself a sin, as opposed to the bank (after many many uncompelled extensions) being villainous for expecting a patron to actually, you know, pay back on a loan they agreed to. I could say more on this, considering one of the witch’s other victims we see in the movie, but I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone who hasn’t seen the movie. If you haven’t, check it out. It’s a wonderful horror movie filled with all sorts of Grade A Raimi wonkiness.
As a Christian I don’t think you can be cursed to Hell by an outside power, just as I don’t think vampires can corrupt one’s soul without the person’s acquiescence. But, you know, it’s a movie.
