Sam Raimi has made a new horror film, Drag Me To Hell, and it's every bit as good as we hoped it would be. Blockbuster.co.uk's Marshall Julius enjoys an audience with the celebrated fantasy filmmaker.
A fan-favourite director who gave an appreciative world its first decent live action
Spider-Man spectacles, with another couple planned for the near future,
Sam Raimi was once a filmmaker synonymous with horror: visual, comical, terrifying flights of the fantastic known to one and all as the
Evil Dead trilogy. Most recently, Raimi returned to those roots to shoot by far the scariest, funniest and all-out barmiest fright flick of the year,
Drag Me To Hell, an instant classic that's both highly recommended and available now from Blockbuster.co.uk, on
Blu-ray and DVD, to add to your list.
The tale of a humble loan officer (
Alison Lohman) whose decision to evict a vengeful old gypsy woman (
Lorna Raver) from her home sees her saddled with a rapidly-escalating demonic curse, Drag Me To Hell, says Raimi, "...was invigorating to shoot. I remembered how much I liked working the craft of the horror film. That is building sequences of suspense to try and get the audience to the edge of their seats.
"I remembered how much I enjoyed playing checkers with the audience. Trying to imagine where they might be at any particular moment, knowing that they might think that something's about to jump out behind a door, and deciding that this time I won't give it to them. I'll give them a laugh instead. A punchline. I like switching up on the audience. Trying to imagine where they are and give them something other than what they expect."
Could Raimi imagine ever making a scary film that didn't punctuate the horror with humour? "I think that I naturally gravitate towards dark humour," he replies, "but yes, I can absolutely imagine making a very straight horror film. It would be a little harder on me, I think, because I just naturally see the comic aspects of horror, but I'd probably be able to filter that out if I had to."
Back in the earliest days of his career, when Raimi was a student of film learning his craft, it would be safe to assume that every aspect of filmmaking was a challenge. Though they were challenges he rose to, and conquered with rare skill, it can't have been easy to pull off a film like The Evil Dead (1981) while in his early twenties. Now almost fifty, with thirty years of filmmaking experience under his belt, and a trio of massive, multi-million dollar Spidey epics to his credit, what challenges are left? Turns out, plenty.
"Each and every film is a tremendous challenge to me," says Raimi candidly. "It's an outrageous challenge that makes me scared and nervous, every time, that I won't be able to pull it off. I have terrible, dark moments at night wondering if scenes won't work, or how did I ever think that ending could be accepted by the audience? In no way is it ever not a tremendous, outrageous challenge and a terribly frightening process.
"This time, with Drag Me To Hell, even though I've made horror films in the past, those were like experiments for me. I was trying to figure out how they were put together. In this case I'm trying to take what I learned about building suspense, scares and twists and take them to the next step. I'm now trying to be aware of the effect they have on the audience, and play with their expectations to keep them more off guard.
"In addition, in the years since I made the Evil Dead films, I've had the wonderful experience of working with some great actors and I've learned the importance of having a central character that the audience can identify with. I've tried to, in this film, combine both for the first time. To put a character in the centre of one of those horror constructs, somebody the audience can take a journey through the eyes of, and doubly impact the audience through the combination of those lessons."
Speaking of wonderful casts, both Lohman and Raver give Raimi their all in this film, both of them clearly willing to do anything asked of them, both equally committed to realising Raimi's madcap visions. "I like a horror film that energises the audience, that makes them excited, that makes them giddy, make them scream and jump and laugh, and you really need to put a lot of energy into a film to charge an audience up like that.
"You need to put a lot of energy into the directing, into the cinematography, and of course, the performances. And this crowd, my Drag Me To Hell crowd, certainly had that energy. Lorna Raver was willing to try again and again until she got it right. As for Alison Lohman, I've never met, except perhaps for
Bruce Campbell and
Tobey Maguire, an actor who's willing to give as much as she did."
Soon to return to the world of Spider-Man to film movies four and five back-to-back, Raimi reveals he's equally excited and inspired by the prospect of making gargantuan superhero adventures as he is by shooting smaller, scarier pictures like Drag Me To Hell. "They each have their own wonderful gifts to give to a filmmaker," he explains.
"In the case of a Spider-Man film, he's a much-beloved character with a long history, and to have the opportunity to tell a Spider-Man story is like being handed the torch of a great myth. And for a brief time, it's your job to tell those stories through your own eyes, through your own experiences, knowing that one day you'll hand that torch to another storyteller. It's a great honour to be able to tell Spider-Man stories.
"In the case of Drag Me To Hell," concludes the movie's writer, director and producer, "there's more freedom then you get with an independent film. There are no expectations and you're free to make any picture you like for the audience. To create brand new characters with no limitations and that's its own reward."