Dragged To A Better Era

Sam Raimi's "Drag Me To Hell" brings the audience back to an older age of horror cinema. Nowadays, the theaters and video store shelves feature movies with torture and pain as their main pleasures. We've forgotten what it's like to be shaken and stirred or how to be disgusted. Raimi, however, returns to his early horror style--his new film is highly reminiscent of "Evil Dead 2" in its combination of laughs and scares--that isn't as scary as it is fun. Welcome to the return of horror-movie-as-haunted-house.

Even though the movie is a lot of fun, "Drag Me To Hell" melds a confidence of style with a desire to please the audience on the most visceral levels. Instead of relying on jump-scares as ominous signals to a horror-familiar audience, Raimi mixes montage and mise-en-scene to give the audience clues when to scream. The camera moves Ophuls-style, maneuvering around the room to check for monsters and sometimes from a character's point-of-view, and Raimi relies on whatever is in the shot to tell the story. As a scene progresses toward a quick scare, however, the scene continues in cuts not unlike an Eisenstein movie. The shots are static, but the edits tell us where to look (sometimes as honest directions and sometimes as red herrings) and, therefore, still leaving the audience looking up, down, and over their shoulders. This technique is best used during a seance at the climax when mise-en-scene and montage seem to become one just as the worlds of the living and the dead collide. Moving and cutting become one action, and before the audience can tell, there seems to be no difference between the two cinematic approaches, just as it's hard to tell which character is possessed and which is not.

"Drag Me To Hell," especially in its blunt title, isn't as elegiac or awe-inducing as some horror films from this past decade like "The Descent" or "Inside," but nonetheless, it's thoroughly enthralling. Raimi has crafted some very special films--the entertainment value "Darkman" is highly underrated--and I'd be suspicious to call this a "great" film, but with his newest movie, Raimi has again accomplished something unique: He is again reminding us how much fun getting scared can be.

Listen to: "I'm In Trouble"--The Replacements--Sorry Ma! Forgot To Take Out The Trash!