Hello Enthusiacs, I am the Lord of Shadow and today we are looking at one of the legends of horror.

Sam Raimi may be well known these days for his work on the Spiderman trilogy, however those of us who follow the darkness known him from a little film you may know as Evil Dead.

Not even close try again minion!

GROOVY!

With the Evil Dead, Sam Raimi scared the hell out of us all and this is his return to the genre. Drag Me to Hell is a very weird and horrifying movie, in the best way possible. Those of us who watched this movie in the cinema know you could cut the tension with a knife.

That is one of the things Raimi always does well: the atmosphere. Rather than simply relying on jump scares to make the viewer jump it’s something as simple as the way the colors of a room play with the light that lets you know something is going on.

The movie starts in 1969 with a seance. A young boy has been hearing voices after taking a necklace from a gypsy. The seance begins and is interrupted almost immediately by the spirit who has come to claim the boys soul. In a moment I can only call freaky he is taken by the spirit into Hell.

This sets the tone for what we can expect as we jump into the modern day. As you can tell the gypsies are, for lack of a better word, the villains in this movie. Lorna Raver plays Sylvia Ganush, the gypsy in question. The plot picks up as she breaks down when she is told that there is nothing anyone can do for her and she is going to lose her home. She begs and pleads but life sucks and people lose their home.

Sylvia focuses her anger on one young woman Christine Brown, played by Alison Lohman, as she was the one to deliver the news to her that there was nothing to be done. Sylvia is dragged from the building by security as she vows vengeance for this insult.

When the day is over, Christine leaves work only to be attacked by Sylvia who gets one of her buttons. Sylvia uses this button to summon a spirit.

For the bulk of the film, Christine is fighting to find a way out of this horrible curse and avoid being dragged into Hell. She learns she is haunted by the spirit Lamia. yet every attempt to stop the curse is meet with failure.

Finally she learns if she gives the cursed object (her button) as a gift to someone else the curse will pass to them. This leads to a very good moment when Christine has to decide if she is willing to damn someone else in her place.

She decides the best thing to do is to give it back to the old woman who cursed her in the first place; she passed away shortly after cursing her so Christine has a grave to defile. Enraged at the sight of the old bag she jams the envelope with the button inside down her throat.

Christine now safe from the curse goes home sleeps and gets ready to meet her boyfriend for a much needed vacation. However when he arrives she finds he is holding an envelope, telling her they must have switched and he needs his coin back.

Christine backs away from him terrified and falls onto train tracks as a train blows its massive horn. It looks like she will be struck when great fiery hands erupt from the train tracks and Clay, her boyfriend, can only watch in horror as she is dragged kicking and screaming into Hell.

And on that image, I leave you.