Sam Raimi blows the spiderwebs firmly away and let’s us know exactly what we’re in for pretty early on in his much-celebrated return to horror filmmaking, Drag Me To Hell. After a short prologue showing us a young boy being rather distressingly, not to mention violently, dragged into a fiery pit which opens beneath him a title card abruptly appears with the film’s name written in massive white letters over black filling up the entire screen. It is a wonderfully simple yet bombastic way to introduce a film and perfectly sets the tone for the outright scream-fest which follows.

The plot is an unsurprisingly slight business concerning Christine, an ambitious young loans officer (Lohman) who chooses to deny a desperate elderly gypsy named Mrs Ganush (Lorna Raver) an extension on her loan and as a result has the Lamia curse inflicted upon her. This means that a thoroughly unpleasant goat faced demon will hound her and haunt her with progressively nasty apparitions and attacks for 3 days before it shows up in person and she suffers the same fate as the unfortunate little fellow in the film’s prologue. This easy-to-follow set-up ensures a relentless succession of ever-increasingly intense scares and horrific set-pieces in which Lohman is subjected to all manner of indignities and atrocities. She is thrown around rooms, punched by invisible assailants and forced to swallow more vile substances than the entire cast of the grimiest of grime films. It seems that every time the repellent Mrs Ganush appears there is some sort of odious substance falling into poor Christine’s mouth whether it be saliva, pus, cockroaches, eyeballs or in one case an entire arm. Raimi really puts Lohman through her paces and she deals with it with an almost Campbell-esque grace, much to her credit.

The fact that this is really all there is to the film does not diminish it at all. It is a shameless assault on the nerves and senses in much the same way that its Evil Dead predecessors were in their heyday. Raimi wrings fresh jolts and scares out of even the most mundane of acts or settings with the use of great sound design and the old fashioned build and release of tension ramped up to a preposterous degree. The creaking of a gate or a buzzing of a fly can become terrifying portents of doom in Raimi’s masterful control. He even (almost) manages to make a handkerchief scary.

The similarities to Raimi’s earlier work do not stop there. The spirit of the Evil Dead films infuses the whole experience and though it is entirely welcome to fans of the series there are moments when it might all get a little too silly for audiences unfamiliar with boomsticks, Deadites and souls being swallowed. One demented sequence in particular could almost be an excerpt from Ash’s finest hour with a possessed man levitating into the air and doing a mad dance whilst bellowing threats at everyone in the room (including a recently possessed goat).

These exuberances do threaten to overbalance the film but by pretending to take itself very seriously it manages to get away with it and the film does provoke an emotional reaction as well as a purely visceral one. The final scene in particular is extremely affecting and will stay with you long after you leave the cinema.

It is great to see the return of good old fashioned make-up and practical special effects at work in many of these sequences and though at times it can look a little hokey it does not detract from the film one iota. The CGI effects fare less well in honesty but again, it hardly matters when there is this much fun to be had.

Drag Me to Hell is a curious film, it is firmly and unashamedly a product of a different era of horror filmmaking, it treads very little new ground and has no pretensions to be anything but what it is – in Raimi’s own words, “a ghost train ride at the fair”. Strangely it is this very quality that makes it feel so fresh and exciting.

Rating: 9/10

Review By Matt Compton