Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Drag Me to Hell
2009 · Sam Raimi · Drag Me to Hell on Sightlines
Start with a mouth. In a parked car, an old woman with no teeth clamps her gums onto a young woman's chin and won't let go. It's disgusting, and the cut lands on it like a joke. Bob Murawski's editing holds the wide shot long enough for you to know where everyone is. Then it fires short inserts at you: a stapler, a ruler, that mouth. Each one hits like a punchline. You flinch and laugh in the same half-second, and Drag Me to Hell lives inside that half-second.
Sam Raimi made this film in 2009, straight after three Spider-Man pictures, from a script he and his brother Ivan had written and shelved in the 1990s. It is small and fast and rated PG-13 on purpose. He wanted a spook-show ride, not a gore film. The plot is a moral fable. Christine Brown, a loan officer at a bank, refuses an elderly woman, Sylvia Ganush, the mortgage extension she needs. Ganush curses her. For three days a demon called the Lamia torments Christine, and if the curse isn't lifted it will take her soul.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, gives us a useful way into why this works so well. He called classical cinema the action-image. A character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the situation changes. Most genre films run on this circuit. Drag Me to Hell runs it flat out. Christine sees the threat, goes to the experts (the storefront psychic Rham Jas, then the medium Shaun San Dena), learns a new rule each day, and fights back. The parking-lot brawl is what Deleuze called a binomial: force against force, two bodies in a duel. Christine wins that round. She has done everything a heroine should, and the title still hangs over her.
That's the trap, and it's why the Deleuzian lens is worth picking up. The action that decides everything has already happened, and it was tiny: a refusal at a desk, made partly to look tough for the bank manager, with a rival at the next desk. Every brave act afterward takes place in a world that has already ruled against her. The machinery of the action-image is all working, and the question is whether any of it can save her.
The film shows you why through its spaces. Peter Deming photographs the bank in bright, clean, beige daylight, the most ordinary light in the movie. Deleuze described a kind of cinema he called naturalism, where a realistic setting, the derived milieu, turns out to be a thin skin over an originary world of raw drives. The bank is the skin. The world under it is all candles and clutter, wind, flies and fluids: a nosebleed that turns into a geyser, embalming fluid sprayed into a face. And the bank's own business is the dark joke underneath. The film is about a debt, and in the originary world debts are collected from the body.
Deleuze said these worlds have a line of slope, an irreversible slide toward exhaustion and death. Here the slope is literally a countdown. That engine comes from Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon (1957), where a runic parchment passes the curse by hand, a deadline approaches, and the hero's last hope is to slip the token back to someone else. Raimi rebuilds it around a button and an envelope. The button becomes what Deleuze called a symbol, an object that holds the film's central relation in one small thing. Once you know the rules, every envelope on screen is a threat. The film depends on how closely you've been taught to watch that object.
The demon itself is mostly kept just beyond the edge of the frame. Deleuze's term is the relative out-of-field, the space next door that the frame implies without showing. Raimi fills it with sound and approach: whispers, wind, clattering objects, and the low, rushing camera he invented for The Evil Dead (1981), which stands in for a force we never see clearly. Christine's sunny little house in the hills is invaded in stages, first wind, then shadows, then flies, then the furniture. Each stage pulls that adjacent space a little closer.
Then comes the push-in. Just before each shock the camera swoops at Alison Lohman's face, and the close-ups of mouths, eyes and fingernails are uncomfortably near. Deleuze called the close-up the affection-image: a feeling registered on a face before it can turn into action. Raimi catches Christine in exactly that gap, when she has seen it and can't yet do anything. He holds the gap open just long enough for you to feel it in your own body. Then the burst. Silence followed by a burst is the film's basic unit.
There's an older theory hiding here too. Sergei Eisenstein spoke of a "montage of attractions," shocks aimed straight at the audience. Deleuze grouped that idea under what he called the attraction-image, where staging shows a thing as spectacle instead of simply playing it out. Film historians later used "cinema of attractions" for early films that existed to jolt the viewer. Raimi's set pieces are attractions in that sense, bolted onto a sturdy action-image chassis. Their grammar comes from a precise place. The Three Stooges short A Plumbing We Will Go (1940) taught him household objects that turn on their users, with every hit pinned to a sound effect. Evil Dead II (1987) turned that into slapstick horror, fluids timed like punchlines. Army of Darkness (1992) added the brothers' sardonic morality and the comedy of misfortune piled on a hero. Tales from the Crypt (1972) supplied the EC Comics contract: cruelty repaid with an ironic punishment, and a sting at the end.
What did the film do? In 2009, after the polished CGI of Spider-Man, Raimi went back to prosthetics, puppetry and goo, and showed that the oldest tools still worked. He proved that terror and slapstick share one grammar, which is timing. A smash cut from a peak of terror to dinner with the boyfriend's parents is a scare technique and a comic one at once, and Raimi knows it. He also showed what a PG-13 rating could get away with when the method is that precise. The film is now generally ranked among the best mainstream American horror films of its decade.
It also leaves you a question the gags don't answer. Christine is sympathetic, and Lohman plays her with a silent-comedian's commitment. But she slides from people-pleaser to a survivor willing to pass the curse on to someone else. Is the curse out of all proportion to the sin? EC comics always said yes, and that was the fun. So when you rewatch, watch the bank. It is the brightest room in the film, and it's where the damage was done. Then watch the cuts and count the beat before each hit. That held breath is Raimi's real invention. He makes you wait in the gap between seeing and acting, and the gap is where he gets you.
Concepts in play
- binomial — The parking-lot brawl between Christine and Ganush is a body-against-body duel staged with stapler, ruler and the gumming mouth.
- derived milieu — The bank is shot in bright, banal corporate daylight (glass, polished desks, beige) as an ironic baseline that the occult world lies beneath.
- originary world — Under the corporate surface are cluttered occult spaces and a world of bodily fluids (nosebleed geyser, embalming fluid, maggots), where the debt is collected from the body.
- line of slope (entropy / degradation) — The three-day curse deadline and the escalating attacks press down an escalating slope; the countdown structure comes from Night of the Demon.
- symbol — The button-and-envelope token that carries the curse, Raimi's rebuilding of Night of the Demon's runic parchment, holds the film's organizing relation and every later scene turns on it.
- relative out-of-field — The Lamia mostly stays offscreen, implied by the rushing unseen-force POV camera from The Evil Dead, whispers, wind and flies, and the staged invasion of Christine's house.
- affection-image (close-up) — Sudden push-ins on faces at the moment of shock and close-ups of mouths, eyes and fingernails catch Christine between perceiving and acting.
- attraction-image — The escalating set pieces (parking-lot brawl, nosebleed geyser, séance with a possessed goat, graveside struggle) are staged as shocks aimed directly at the audience, with Stooges-style object gags.