Movies
B-D Gets an Early Look at Sam Raimi’s ‘Drag Me to Hell’!
It’s coming… Sam Raimi’s big return to horror. You’ve been waiting 16 years for this and now on May 29th you’ll get Drag Me to Hell, thanks to Universal Pictures. Last night I snuck into an early test screening of the film in Burbank, CA. Beyond the break you can read my early thoughts on the work-in-progress, which is an original tale of a young woman’s desperate quest to break an evil curse.
**Spoilers follow**
Sam Raimi, where have you been?
It has technically been 16 years since the legendary director has got behind the camera for a horror film. After ARMY OF DARKNESS failed to perform at the box office, the creator of THE EVIL DEAD franchise moved away from horror and into the mainstream fold. Now, after directing three SPIDER-MAN films and becoming one of the biggest names in the industry, Raimi has returned to the genre he started in.
While Raimi returned to horror with Universal Pictures’ DRAG ME TO HELL, I can’t say I was waiting with open arms. I felt wounded and insulted that we still haven’t received our EVIL DEAD 4 and didn’t understand why he’d do DRAG instead of another adventure of Ashley J. Williams. Therefore, my expectations were extremely low and I was convinced I’d be disappointed with his big return to horror. I was wrong.
Last night my curiosity got the best of me as I snuck into a test screening of DRAG ME TO HELL in Burbank, CA. To be clear, what I saw was a very early workprint of the film, which featured a temp score, unfinished effects, and was projected on a Digit Beta (yet to be color corrected). To put it simply, it’s far from completed. Still, even through all of the rough edges, Raimi proved that he is still a master filmmaker.
DRAG ME TO HELL was quite simply the most PERFECT horror film I’ve seen in a long, long while. Raimi stirs a delicious witches brew that blends gore, scares and fun into a perfect blend. The flavor of Raimi’s directing ability is brought out by masterful editing by Bob Murowski (Army of Darkness) as every scare is perfectly timed, every gag is delivered with a punch and all of the payoffs are perfectly executed.
HELL is like a comic book come to life that is full of color characters, crazy imagery and cheap gags that work every single time. Raimi plays around with the audience by using the gross-out factor to the max. For example, in one scene Alison Lohman starts bleeding from her mouth, and when she goes to cover it, blood shoots from her nose all over the place. Another great gag is the gypsy is constantly is losing her dentures and pushing her disgusting old mouth on things (like Alison’s face). Raimi fills the movie with these gross-out moments that keep the momentum burning from start to finish.
And for every bloody, gooey and disgusting scene, Raimi gives us an equally good scare. It has been a long, long time since I’ve experienced an authentic jump in a movie. Typically a director will have a cat jump on screen or have a character slam a door shut – something cheap to get you to jolt. Raimi hits us with a barrage of punches as I jumped ten feet out of my seat on two separate occasions. He proves that he is a master of horror and suspense and I recommend that any horror filmmaker wannabe (pretty much every horror director out there) watch this work to learn how to do it right.
Quite simply put, DRAG ME TO HELL was a blast and moved quickly from start to finish. Whether or not the acting is top notch, or if the story even makes sense is inconsequential so long as I’m gasping, jumping, laughing and cringing every step of the way. From what I saw, DRAG ME TO HELL is well on its way to becoming an immediate classic (considering they don’t f*ck up the finished version). The only question I was left with was, “Why isn’t this EVIL DEAD 4?”
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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