I went to see Drag Me to Hell this week, and had a pretty great time. The film probably won’t stand with Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2, but it’s a highly enjoyable outing that easily is the best horror movie I’ve seen in theaters in some time.
On the other hand, it should be, because the film is clearly Raimi’s riff on the 1957 classic Curse of the Demon (Night of the Demon in Britain). It’s not a redo, but rather a reinterpretation of many of the elements of that film, in the same manner that the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing sprung from Jean-Pierre Melville’s Los Doulos, or Shaun of the Dead did from Night of the Living Dead.
The structure of the film can even be seen as a metacomment on Curse of the Demon‘s famous backstory. The film was helmed by Jacques Tourneur, a director who earlier worked in the stable of famed producer Val Lewton. Lewton is best known for a series of subtly creepy horror films—Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, etc.—that operated under the principle that what the audience doesn’t see can be scarier than what it is shown.
Both Tourneur and scriptwriter Charles Bennett (adapting M. R. James’ classic short story Casting the Runes) intended the film to operate in this manner. The story involves a stiff-necked, somewhat smug scientist (Dana Andrews) who is initially amused to find himself cursed by a Satanist (a superlative and surprisingly sympathetic turn by Niall MacGinnis) he is investigating to prove a fraud. Events of a possibly supernatural nature begin to occur as the deadline of the curse draws near, and the scientist starts to crack under the pressure.
As noted, Tourneur and Bennett wanted the nature of the curse to be left to the viewer, as to whether it was real or merely paranoia induced in the scientist’s mind. This in the same way that most great ghosts movies (The Haunting, The Innocents) deal with similar ambiguity over what is happening. That idea is still clearly evident in the final version of the film if you’re looking for it.
However, producer Hal Chester had other ideas. Fearing that a quasi/maybe supernatural movie would bomb at the box office, he inserted (over Tourneur and Bennett’s strenuous objections) appearances by an actual demon at the beginning and end of the film. The only reason Chester isn’t still universally pilloried for this is that, truth be told, the film’s demon is about the coolest one ever committed to film.
Raimi’s film is somewhat similar. Although it seems less concerned with raising doubt in the viewer’s mind, for much of the movie (assuming you clip a scene here and there) it remains possible that everything apparently happening to the film’s cursed heroine is in fact occurring only in her mind. The film even provides an analogue to Curse of the Demon‘s Andrews in the “I’m a Mac” guy, who plays the heroine’s avowed skeptic of a boyfriend. Indeed, Andrews has a believing romantic interest in the earlier film, and Raimi’s picture basically just switches which of the two ends up cursed.
There are other similarities. Both curses involve a horrible doom at a stated time, with a gradual ratcheting up of torment in the meanwhile. Both involve an artifact tied to the curse (a slip inscribed with runes in Curse; a button from the heroine’s jacket in Drag Me) that may also offer the only hope of salvation, and in pretty much the same manner. Both movies offer séances and even a major supporting character of East Indian extraction.
Some have posited their view that Raimi seemed constrained by the film’s PG-13 rating, but I think they’re projecting. (By which I mean they belong to that demographic that refuses to credit anything lacking an R rating as actually being a horror movie.) Raimi clearly has fun making the film as gross as he can without actually making it gory, and that seems to me to be what he was going after. There really aren’t any points in the film where it seemed like things might have gone in a gorier direction. I’m sure they’ll release a slightly ‘harder’ version of the movie on the DVD, presumably an “unrated” cut. However, all that really means is a version they didn’t submit to the MPAA for a rating. I’m be surprised if the DVD cut is substantially different or more graphic than the current version.
Despite nearly universal critical praise, the film is sadly not doing well. Teens, the usual audience for horror, perhaps has little interest in seeing a more classical horror films that strays away from slasher killers or emo vampires. Even so, I exhort all lovers of good horror movies to go see this while it’s in the theaters, given that the film really profits from being seen on a big screen.
If you do wait until it’s on video, though, you may as well dig up the DVD for Curse of the Demon (the longer British cut, Night of the Demon, is offered on the same disc) and settle in for an interesting evening of compare and contrast.
