Paramount+ Horror Comedy Is Fan-Favorite Director’s Most Overlooked Movie

Released in 2009, Drag Me to Hell was directed by Sam Raimi and co-written by the director with his brother Ivan Raimi. It was a financial and critical success, earning $90 million at the box office on a $30 million budget and getting a 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Despite that initial success, the film is rarely talked about even within the horror community.

Drag Me to Hell follows Christine, a loan officer played by Alison Lohman, who is cursed after refusing to give an elderly woman an extension on her loan payments.

She is plagued by horrific visions and told that the demon Lamia will torment her for three days before literally taking her to hell. The rest of the film centers around Christine’s attempts to rid herself of the curse or pass it on to someone else. 

Like the first two Evil Dead films, Drag Me to Hell straddles the line between horror and horror comedy. Genuinely horrific moments like victims being dragged to hell by disembodied hands appear alongside comedic moments like a man fighting a talking, possessed goat.

Other grotesque moments, like the frequent vomiting of bile throughout the movie, manage to evoke horror and comedy at the same time. 

It would be easy to write Drag Me to Hell off as a schlocky, B-movie, with nothing to say, but its plot was a dark reflection of the financial crisis going on when it was released.

While Sam Raimi has claimed it was a coincidence, the fact that Christine’s fatal sin was evicting a woman from her home perfectly evoked the 2008 housing crash. Intentional or not, the movie’s moral of greed over empathy leading to ruin was a perfect metaphor for the global financial crises of the late 2000s. 

The one technical area where Drag Me to Hell falls short is in its acting. While Alison Lohman delivers a strong performance as the lead, Justin Long, who plays Chrstine’s boyfriend, and several other actors give flat deliveries that feel out of place in the otherwise over-the-top movie.

These underwhelming performances and the lack of a great comedic performer like Bruce Campbell keep the film from reaching its full comedic potential. 

Drag Me to Hell also features a prominent story element that hasn’t aged well, in the character of Mrs. Ganush. By making the character Romani, the movie feeds into a longstanding racist trope common in stories from traditional European folk tales to Stephen King’s Thinner.

While the movie is sympathetic to Mrs. Ganush’s plight, its portrayal of the woman and her family relies on negative stereotypes.  

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While it has a few flaws that keep it from reaching the heights of Evil Dead 2, Drag Me to Hell is still a fun and masterfully made horror comedy. If another director had made the movie I think it would be considered a modern masterpiece, but as a Raimi movie, it’s been unable to escape the shadow of the Evil Dead. If you’re one of the people who missed this underrated horror film, watch Drag Me to Hell on Paramount+ today.