Drag Me to Hell

In 1969 Pasadena, a Hispanic couple seek help from young medium Shaun San Dena, claiming their son Juan is hearing evil voices after having stolen a silver necklace from a Romani woman's wagon, despite his attempts to return it. San Dena prepares a séance, but an unseen force attacks them and drags Juan to Hell. San Dena vows to fight the demon again one day. Forty years later, in present-day Los Angeles, bank loan officer Christine Brown vies for a promotion to assistant branch manager with her co-worker, Stu Rubin. Her boss, Jim Jacks, advises her to demonstrate tough decision-making. When Sylvia Ganush, an elderly and disheveled Romani woman, asks for a third extension on her mortgage due to economic problems resulting from an illness, Christine, against her better judgement, denies her request, and Sylvia desperately begs not to have her house repossessed. As security guards escort her out, she accuses Christine of publicly shaming her. Later, in the parking garage, Sylvia attacks her as she is leaving. After a struggle, Sylvia rips a button from Christine's coat and places a curse on it. After she returns it, she warns that Christine will soon come begging to her. Christine and her boyfriend Clay Dalton, a college professor, visit fortune teller Rham Jas, who explains that a dark spirit has latched onto her. At home, the entity tortures Christine, and at work, she suffers a violent nosebleed while hallucinating about Sylvia. As she leaves, Stu covertly confiscates a file from her desk. Christine visits Sylvia's granddaughter Ilenka, intending to apologize to Sylvia, but Ilenka reveals Sylvia has recently died. She inadvertently embarrasses the attendees at her funeral, and Ilenka warns her that she deserves her eventual fate. Jas explains to Christine that she has been inflicted with the curse of the Lamia or "Black Goat"; an ancient and powerful demon that torments its victims for three days before literally dragging them to Hell. Following his suggestion of an appeasatory sacrifice, Christine reluctantly kills her pet kitten before meeting Clay's wealthy parents Trudy and Leonard at their house for dinner, during which grotesque hallucinations torment her further. Jas offers to introduce a furious Christine to San Dena for $10,000, which a sympathetic Clay pays on her behalf. Revealing that she has been awaiting vengeance against the Lamia, San Dena and her assistant prepare a séance, attempting to trap the spirit in a goat and kill the animal to destroy the demon, but the entity possesses her, the goat and her assistant, the last of whom vomits up the corpse of Christine's deceased cat. After successfully banishing the Lamia, she dies soon afterwards. Jas seals the button in an envelope and tells Christine that she can remove the curse by giving the button to someone else, thus transferring the curse to them. At a 24-hour diner, Christine telephones Stu, accusing him of stealing her file and demanding he meet her there, intending to present the cursed button to him. When he arrives, he successfully implores her to pity him and abstain from notifying Jacks about his transgressions. Consulting Jas, Christine learns she can formally offer the curse to the deceased, so she exhumes Sylvia's corpse and shoves the envelope into her mouth. A massive downpour nearly traps her in the grave, but she successfully manages to escape. Returning home, she ventures to Union Station, where Clay intends to romantically propose to her. Jacks also telephones her, explaining that she has received the promotion after Stu was ultimately dismissed for stealing her file earlier. At Union Station, Clay presents her with an envelope he had discovered in his automobile, which is revealed to contain her cursed coat button; before exhuming Sylvia, she had mistaken it for a similar envelope containing a rare coin she had given to Clay earlier, meaning that the curse was never broken, and the Lamia is still coming for her. Horrified, she stumbles backwards onto the tracks; as a train speeds towards her, demonic hands emerge from the ground and drag her down into the fiery caverns of Hell, leaving a shocked and horrified Clay staring at the tracks from the platform above with tears streaming down his face and the cursed button still in his hands. ==Cast==

in 2008 The film includes cameo appearances by Raimi himself as an uncredited ghost at the séance, his younger brother Ted as a doctor, and his eldest children Emma, Henry, and Lorne in minor roles. Frequent Raimi collaborator Scott Spiegel appears as a mourner at the death feast, while fellow frequent Raimi collaborator John Paxton and Irene Roseen appear as the old couple at the diner. ==Themes and interpretations==

Drag Me to Hell has been noted for its relevance to the subprime mortgage crisis and more broadly, the Great Recession, which were ongoing at the time of the film's release. Director Sam Raimi reportedly considered this a coincidence, stating, "We just wanted to tell the story of a person who wants to be a good person but who makes a sinful choice out of greed, for their own benefit, and pays the price for it." ==Production==

Background The original story for Drag Me to Hell was written ten years before the film went into production and was written by Sam Raimi and his brother Ivan Raimi. The film went into production under the name The Curse. The Raimis wrote the script as a morality tale, desiring to write a story about a character who wants to be a good person, but makes a sinful choice out of greed for her own betterment and pays the price for it. The Raimis tried to make the character of Christine the main focal point in the film, and tried to have Christine in almost all the scenes in the film. After finishing the script, Raimi desired to make the picture after the first draft of the script was completed, but other projects such as the Spider-Man film series became a nearly decade-long endeavor, pushing opportunities to continue work on Drag Me to Hell to late 2007. After the previous three Spider-Man films, Raimi came back to the script of Drag Me to Hell, wanting to make a simpler and lower-budget film. In 2007, Sam Raimi's friend and producer Robert Tapert of Ghost House Pictures had the company sign on to finance the film. The main role eventually went to Lohman, who did not enjoy horror films, but enjoyed doing the stunts during filming. Production for Drag Me to Hell began on location in Tarzana, California. and later in a vinyl edition by Waxwork Records in 2018. Sam Raimi stated that emphasis was on using the soundtrack to create a world that didn't exist, a world of the "supernatural". The score contains elements of Young's previous work on Flowers in the Attic. This is particularly apparent in the utilization of the ethereal childlike soprano vocals that feature prominently throughout the soundtrack. ==Release==

Drag Me to Hell was first shown to the public as a "Work in Progress" print at the South by Southwest festival on March 15, 2009. The film debuted in its full form at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, where it was shown out of competition on May 20, 2009, as a midnight screening. It was released on May 29, 2009. Home media Drag Me to Hell was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc in the US on October 13, 2009. For home video, an unrated edition was made available in addition to the theatrical version, the unrated version containing some additional moments of gory violence. In its first two weeks the DVD sold 459,217 copies generating $7.98 million in sales. It has since accumulated $13.9 million in DVD sales in the United States. On February 13, 2018, Scream Factory released a two-disc Collector's Edition of Drag Me to Hell, which included both the theatrical and unrated versions of the film remastered from the 2K digital intermediate, archival interviews and featurettes and all-new interviews with Alison Lohman, Lorna Raver and Christopher Young. They would also later issue an Ultra HD Blu-ray edition on October 29, 2024, including all previous bonus features and a new director and editor-approved 4K remaster of both versions of the film, based on a scan of a preservation film negative. ==Reception==

Box office The film was released in the United States on May 29, 2009. The film opened at #4 with $15.8 million from 2,900 screens at 2,508 theaters, an average of $6,310 per theater ($5,457 average per screen). In its second weekend, it dropped 56%, falling to #7, with $7 million, for an average of $2,805 per theater ($2,514 average per screen), and bringing the 10-day gross to $28,233,230. Even though its two-week initial performance was described as "disappointing", Drag Me to Hell closed on August 6, 2009, with a final gross in the United States and Canada of $42.1 million, and an additional $48.7 million internationally for a total of $90.8 million worldwide. Critical response On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 92% based on 270 reviews, and an average rating of 7.6/10. The site's critical consensus states, "Sam Raimi returns to top form with Drag Me to Hell, a frightening, hilarious, delightfully campy thrill ride." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 83 out of 100, based on 32 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film an "A" rating, stating that "Raimi has made the most crazy, fun, and terrifying horror movie in years." Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times praised the film, writing that it "should not be dismissed as yet another horror flick just for teens. The filmmakers have given us a 10-story winding staircase of psychological tension that is making very small circles near the end." Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune described the film as a "hellaciously effective B-movie [that] comes with a handy moral tucked inside its scares, laughs and Raimi's specialty, the scare/laugh hybrid." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times gave the film 3 out of 4 stars, and stated that the film "is a sometimes funny and often startling horror movie. That is what it wants to be, and that is what it is." In a positive review, Variety said of the film: "Scant and barren of subtext, the pic is single-mindedly devoted to pushing the audience's buttons... Still, there's no denying it delivers far more than competing PG-13 thrillers." Bloody Disgusting gave the film four and a half stars out of five, with the review calling it "quite simply the most perfect horror film I've seen in a long, long while... [It's] a blast and moved quickly from start to finish [and] is well on its way to becoming an immediate classic." The film was then ranked thirteenth in Bloody Disgusting's list of the 'Top 20 Horror Films of the Decade'. Rex Reed of The New York Observer thought that the plot wasn't believable enough, and Peter Howell of The Toronto Star disliked Lohman's performance and thought the film was "just not very funny". Some reviews considered the film a comedy horror in the style that Raimi is known for. The film "blends horror and humor so well that viewers don't know whether to laugh or scream", noted TV Guide, which also hailed it as "a popcorn film that aims to entertain—nothing more, nothing less—and it achieves that goal admirably. Few films, horror or otherwise, can boast such a claim, making Raimi's self-described 'spook-a-blast' an excellent example of a film where ambition and execution come together in perfect harmony." Vic Holtreman of Screen Rant stated that the film blends comedy and horror in a similar fashion to the way Army of Darkness does. According to a reviewer at UGO Networks, the film is primarily a comedy rather than a horror, and this is consistent with Raimi's directing style, which has not included any "true horror" films. ==Accolades==

The film was nominated for "Choice Movie: Horror/Thriller" at the 2009 Teen Choice Awards, which the film lost to Friday the 13th (2009). At the 2009 Scream Awards show, Drag Me to Hell won the awards for Best Horror Movie and Best Scream-play. The film also won Best Horror Film at the Saturn Awards. ==Potential sequel==

In March 2023, Raimi revealed that Ghost House Pictures was actively trying to come up with ideas for a potential sequel for the film. ==See also==