21: Drag Me to Hell

When Sam Raimi makes a horror movie, you sit up and take notice. His first feature length film, The Evil Dead, wasn't perfect, but it is still remembered as a cult classic. Evil Dead II was perfect, its first half a genuinely creepy tale of one man fighting against a horde of demon's slowly driving him insane and its second half a kickass action movie when he picks up a shotgun and a chainsaw and starts fighting back, with a vein of black comedy throughout to provide cohesion. I doubt I even need to say anything about Army of Darkness.

After spending the 2000's making two extremely good superhero films, he is finally back to horror with Drag me To Hell, and its got the blood of Evil Dead II running in its veins. When Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) finds herself on the wrong end of a gypsy curse, she has three days to find out a way to escape before she is damned to hell. While she looks, she is being more and more severely tormented by the Lamia, the demon that is trying to take her there. The films strongest aspect is its ability to meld its sense of humor with the horror. For instance, she goes and meets a psychic to try and expel the demon. This psychic is obviously money-hungry, and that winds up being milked for a lot of laughs. But, in the end, the main character is still putting all of her hope in this person who could pretty easily just be a conman, so the same scenes also manage to extend the helplessness of her situation, which works brilliantly.

This film is disgusting, but not in the traditional gory way. It's the kind of thing that never really happens in real life, so it never even occurs to you that it is as nasty as it is. Some of the gags wouldn't look entirely remiss in a Looney Tunes cartoon. At one point, Christine accidentally swallows a fly, and you still here the fly buzzing around in her stomach for the rest of the movie. Half of the film is hysterical because it is so over the top, and half of it is really quite nasty, but my friends and I can't agree which scenes go in which half.

I'm always a sucker for a good haunting film. They just work so well: the ghosts (or Lamias) start off slow and slowly ramp up the terror of their victim. They can be anywhere, at anytime. They are inherently unknowable and always a threat. Something supernatural just gives good directors so much more room to work with to set up good scenes. In a slasher movie, it usually doesn't make a lot of sense for the serial killer to start slow and ramp up the tension from there, but the film needs that to work. But in a film where the Monsters only motivation is to scare someone and mess with their head, everything works perfectly.

Because the monsters motivations and the directors motivations are exactly the same. Sam Raimi wants to mess with our heads, and he is the best at it.