Sam Raimi spent the 2000s directing three Spider-Man films that made him one of the most bankable directors in Hollywood. Then he went back and made a horror movie about a bank loan officer who gets cursed by an old woman in a parking garage. Drag Me to Hell, released in the United States on May 29, 2009, runs 99 minutes, cost $30 million, and carries a Metacritic score of 83 out of 100. Sam Raimi’s return to horror is, in this paper’s view, the best thing he has done, and it is not close.
Trailer, via ScreamFactoryTV.
Christine Brown Says No to Sylvia Ganush
The setup is a moral trap disguised as a workplace drama. Christine Brown, played by Alison Lohman, works at a Los Angeles bank and wants a promotion to assistant branch manager. Her competition is Stu Rubin, played by Reggie Lee. Her boss, Jim Jacks, played by David Paymer, tells her she needs to show she can make the hard decisions.
Then Sylvia Ganush walks in. Lorna Raver plays her as a hunched, wheezing, disheveled Romani woman who needs a third extension on her mortgage. She is behind on payments because of an illness. Christine denies the extension, against her better judgement. Sylvia begs her not to take the house. Security guards drag her out. She screams that Christine has publicly shamed her.
That night, in a parking garage, Sylvia attacks Christine in her car. There is a fight. Sylvia rips a button off Christine’s coat and puts a curse on it. She warns that Christine will come begging to her.
Three Days, One Button, No Exit
The tagline lays out the clock: “Christine Brown has a good job, a great boyfriend, and a bright future. But in three days, she’s going to hell.” The film means that literally. A dark spirit latches onto her. Over three days it torments her in escalating bursts. At work she has a violent nosebleed while hallucinating about Sylvia. At home the entity throws her around her apartment.
Christine’s boyfriend is Clay Dalton, played by Justin Long, a college professor and the son of wealthy parents. He is skeptical. He thinks she is stressed. He is wrong in the way that boyfriends in horror films are always wrong, but Long plays him as genuinely decent rather than stupid, which is a harder trick.
The couple visits a fortune teller named Rham Jas, played by Dileep Rao. He explains what has latched onto her. He is the first person who believes her. Rao plays him with a calm that the rest of the movie entirely lacks, and it works. Producer Grant Curtis later described Rao’s audition, saying that Sam told him, “There’s no minimum age requirement on wisdom.” That is the whole character, and Rao delivers it.
A Séance and Shaun San Dena
The film opens in 1969 Pasadena, not in Los Angeles. A Hispanic couple bring their son Juan to a young medium named Shaun San Dena, played by Adriana Barraza. Juan stole a silver necklace from a Romani woman’s wagon and now hears evil voices. He tried to return it. San Dena holds a séance. Something unseen attacks them and drags Juan to hell. San Dena vows to fight the demon again one day.
Forty years later, that day arrives. The 2009 séance is the film’s centerpiece and, to this paper’s eye, its best sequence. San Dena returns, older. The demon arrives. It is a scene that could be ridiculous, and it is, and it is also genuinely frightening, which is the exact combination Raimi has been chasing since The Evil Dead.
Sam Raimi Wrote This in the 1990s
Drag Me to Hell was not a quick job. Sam Raimi and his brother Ivan wrote the script in the 1990s under the title The Curse. They conceived it as a “cruel morality tale,” designed to punish a well-intentioned protagonist for one selfish mistake. They wanted the visceral, slapstick-horror tone of Raimi’s earlier Evil Dead films. Then they shelved it. They finished it in 2007, after Spider-Man 3.
Raimi partnered with Ghost House Pictures to make the film independently, outside major studio constraints. It was shot in Tarzana, California, in 2008. The premiere was at SXSW on March 15, 2009. The theatrical release followed on May 29, 2009. The available source material cuts off mid-sentence on the distributor, so this piece does not name one.
The casting history is worth knowing because it explains the film’s texture. Elliot Page was originally cast as Christine but dropped out due to scheduling issues related to a SAG strike. Lohman took the role. She did not enjoy horror films. She did enjoy doing the stunts, which is visible in every scene where Christine is thrown across a room.
Raver, a stage actress, auditioned for Mrs. Ganush without knowing what the character would become. She said all she had read was “about a little old lady coming into the bank because they’re closing down her house. It was only later that I saw the whole script and said, ‘Oh, my!'” She met with a Hungarian dialect coach and had portions of the script translated into Hungarian. Raimi later asked her to use some of those Hungarian words during the scenes where Ganush attacks Christine. That detail matters. The curse is not generic. It has a language.
What Actually Works Here
The film’s reputation rests on a few things, and in this paper’s reading they are not equally important. Ranked by how much they carry the movie:
- Lorna Raver’s performance as Sylvia Ganush, which is the engine of the entire film and, in this paper’s view, would sink it if it were even slightly off.
- The parking garage fight, which is the best-staged scene in the movie and establishes the rules in under five minutes.
- The 2009 séance, which delivers the film’s biggest swing.
- Alison Lohman’s physical commitment, which sells a woman being physically dragged toward damnation for 99 minutes.
- The ending, which is the cruelest joke in a movie built out of cruel jokes.
The supporting cast is stacked with Raimi regulars. Chelcie Ross plays Clay’s father, Leonard Dalton. Molly Cheek plays his mother, Trudy. Bojana Novaković plays Ilenka Ganush, Sylvia’s granddaughter.
Ilenka Ganush and the Funeral
Christine visits Ilenka intending to apologize to Sylvia. Ilenka reveals that Sylvia has recently died. Christine inadvertently embarrasses the attendees at the funeral, and Ilenka warns her that she deserves her eventual fate.
There are cameos everywhere. Raimi himself appears as an uncredited ghost at the séance. His younger brother Ted plays a doctor. His eldest children, Emma, Henry and Lorne, appear in minor roles. Scott Spiegel, a frequent Raimi collaborator, plays a mourner at the death feast. John Paxton and Irene Roseen play an old couple at a diner. Octavia Spencer is in there too, along with Joanne Baron, Tom Carey, Aimee Miles and Bill E. Rogers, all of whom have worked with Raimi before.
The Button Is the Whole Movie
The curse travels through a button. That is the detail that makes Drag Me to Hell work and the detail that most horror films of its era would have gotten wrong. A button is small, ordinary, and easy to lose.
The film’s cruelty is, in this paper’s reading, structural. Christine denies Sylvia’s extension against her better judgement. The film punishes her anyway. That is the point Sam and Ivan Raimi built the script around in the 1990s, and it holds up because the film, as this paper reads it, never asks you to feel sorry for Christine. It asks you to watch.
The Raimi slapstick is everywhere, and in this paper’s view it is the part that dates best. None of it is subtle and none of it is meant to be. The film is 99 minutes long and, to this paper’s eye, it does not have a slow stretch in it.
Where It Sits
Drag Me to Hell premiered at SXSW on March 15, 2009, and opened in the United States on May 29, 2009. In this paper’s reading, it sits between the torture-porn cycle and the haunted-house revival and belongs to neither. It is a hybrid: a $30 million movie made outside the major studio system by a director who had just finished the biggest franchise of his career, working from a script he wrote with his brother more than a decade earlier.
That is the part worth noticing. In this paper’s view, Raimi did not come back to horror to reinvent it. He came back to do the thing he already knew how to do, with better tools and a meaner script.
This paper’s own criticism is that Clay is underwritten. Justin Long is good in the role, but the character exists mainly to disbelieve Christine and then to be proven right too late. The film does not need him the way it needs Rham Jas or San Dena.
The bigger point, and this is the paper’s view rather than a measured outcome, is that Drag Me to Hell understands the difference between a scare and a joke and refuses to choose. It does both at once, repeatedly, for 99 minutes, and it lands almost every time. The Metacritic score of 83 backs the general reception, but the case for the film rests on Raver, the button, and that séance.
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