One of the enduring lessons of horror cinema is probably “Never fuck with gypsies.” Seriously. If you hit them with your car, embarrass them in public or even grab the last box of Fruity Pebbles at the grocery store, they will come after you and curse your ass. Oh sure, you’ll try to appease them. Buy them a whole truckload of Pebbles, give them all of your livestock, buy their dog, arrange a murder – anything to get them to stop, but the gypsy won’t care; they’ll mumble something in Romani and call you a gadjo and then leave you to your gruesome, ironic fate. Movie gypsies (as opposed to real gypsies, mind you) are an unstoppable force of blood-soaked, malicious nature. If you suspect that you are in a horror movie and you see one, run as hard and as fast as you can and pray that your running in front of them does not offend their strange Romani code.
Drag Me To Hell is a movie about what happens when you fuck with gypsies. It is as terrifying as you’d expect. A mild-mannered former farmgirl who’s trying to make good in the big city forecloses on an old gypsy woman’s house and becomes the object of the crone’s unceasing torment in the form of a demonic haunting that will claim her life after 3 days. Yes, it sounds a bit like The Ring. The trailers for the film even make it look like The Ring a bit. Ignore that, except for the similarities in quality that the two share. Drag Me To Hell is the best supernatural horror film that I’ve seen in the past decade. It’s taut, well-paced, and unafraid, with a strong moral center that challenges the preconceptions of the viewer all while grossing them out and making them laugh, occasionally at the same time. The movie has few cheap jump scares and kills in the tension management department (the control of the audience’s emotional state, which reader of my horror content at my old blog know is a huge, huge structural issue in horror for me).
Sam Raimi is channeling Evil Dead 2 here, not Spider-Man 3, and that should make the hardcore very pleased. Alison Lohman is as instantly likable as she’s always been and Raimi coaxes a performance other than “I’m a Mac” out of Justin Long, which is positively shocking.
If you’re on the fence about Drag Me To Hell, it’s not exactly what the TV spots portray it as. Evil Dead-heads should definitely give it a chance, definitely, but it’s genuinely entertaining for everybody else, too. Besides, if you don’t check it out, a gypsy will put a curse on you.
