Drag Me to Hell: The New Evil Dead?

By Rhea Dee

Um, No.

Sam Raimi has always been a hit or miss director for me.  Evil Dead series?  Total hit.  Spider-Man series?  First one was a hit, second one was a miss and third one was a complete miss.  The Gift?  Let’s never talk about that movie again.

So I wasn’t thrilled when Drag Me To Hell was announced.  Everyone else, on the other hand, seemed super duper excited.  Raimi returns to horror!  It’ll be just like Evil Dead!  Yay!

But for some reason, I just couldn’t muster up the excitement for Raimi’s return to horror.  This is most likely because I absolutely hated Spider-Man 3.  (And also because of The Gift.  My God, that movie was awful.)

Then the reviews started coming out.  And wow, did everyone love this movie or what?  I read many reviews that talked about the excellent mix of humor and horror and I gotta tell you, that made my heart sing a little.  Maybe this movie wouldn’t be as bad as I thought it would be.  Maybe this movie would be a hit.

Well, it wasn’t a hit. But it wasn’t a miss either.

Drag Me to Hell follows a simple plot: girl gets cursed after rejecting a loan extension for an old woman who just happens to be a gypsy.  Creepy stuff happens to the girl.  Evil Dead also had a simple plot: four people awaken a demon in the woods that ends up possessing them.  Save one.  But where Evil Dead takes the simple plotline and expands it into something really creepy (and gross and hilarious), Drag Me to Hell just…doesn’t.

Not that it didn’t try. There were many scenes in Drag Me to Hell that tried to gross you out, tried to freak you out, and tried to make you laugh.  And while some of those were effective (the sound design for the film was amazingly freaky, but then again Raimi’s sound design has always impressed me) I found myself constantly comparing the film to Evil Dead.  Like, ‘Wow!  That was icky!  But not as icky as Evil Dead.  Or wow, that was kind of funny!  But not as funny as Evil Dead.’  And so on and so forth.

And that wasn’t me being some sort of Evil Dead purist (although I’ll freely admit to that).  Throughout the whole film, Raimi did constant nods to the Evil Dead series, like Drag Me To Hell was his own personal love letter to films he made 20 some years ago.   Eyeball flying into an open mouth.  Blood spurting out in ridiculous amounts.  Alison Lohman, the star of the film, even says “I’m gonna get some” in a growly voice, mimicking when Ash said “Come get some” to Henrietta in Evil Dead II.  And while these were done as an obvious wink to the fans of Evil Dead, it only made me realize how vastly superior Evil Dead is to this movie.

But realizing that Evil Dead is (and will always be) vastly superior to this film doesn’t mean that this film was a complete failure.  There were actual moments where I laughed and jumped and got grossed out.  But like I said, most of those moments were drenched in Evil Dead, so it was hard to enjoy them on their own.

And that’s the root of the problem with Drag Me to Hell: too much Evil Dead.  Raimi didn’t set out to create a new horror film, he set out to create a watered down, PG-13 version of Evil Dead.  And while the film is far from the terrible quality of Spider-Man 3 or The Gift, if I want to see an Evil Dead type movie, I’ll just watch the original.

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Rhea Dee teeters between hipster and geek (at least that’s what that one quiz said).  She spends her time collecting vintage junk, daydreaming about Eli Roth, and pondering the genius of John Carpenter soundtracks.  She really likes horror films.

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Related Reading:

Short History of the Movies, A (10th Edition)

The Movie Business Book, Third Edition

Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies

Twilight: The Complete Illustrated Movie Companion

Understanding Movies (12th Edition) (MyCommunicationKit Series)