Editorials
Did Christine Brown Deserve Her Fate in ‘Drag Me to Hell?’
Drag Me to Hell is a masterpiece. That is not a popular opinion among some of you, but the fact is that it’s a brilliant horror comedy that culminates in one of the most brutal endings in horror movie history.
***SPOILERS FOR A SEVEN-YEAR-OLD FILM BELOW***
As many of you already know, poor Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) does get dragged to Hell in the final scene of Drag Me to Hell. There are quite a few people who, shockingly, are alright with this and feel that Ms. Brown deserved her fate to burn in Hell for all eternity.
How could anyone think that poor, poor Christine Brown deserved to get dragged to Hell only to be tortured by the Lamia? The goat demon gives you a pretty clear idea of what would happen to her: it would feast upon her soul while she festered in the grave. Does anyone deserve that treatment?
Without calling any of you out, here is a small sampling of reader comments from posts I have made on this site about Drag Me to Hell:
- “I couldn’t even root for the lead girl. She was so unlikable and then when she killed the kitten it just sealed my disdain for her.”
- “It’s really the old woman that’s the victim in this story and Alison Lohman, I think her character Christine deserved probably what she got.”
- “The audience kind of overlooks and makes excuses for the selfish choices her character makes throughout the film and therefore ends up shocked and surprised by what happens to her in the end.”
- “She was a self-centered person who gave the appearance that she was a nice innocent lady who was willing to make Ganush suffer in Hell after all that she did to the old lady while she was alive. The bank teller dug her own Hell.”
- “Drag Me to Hell had a happy ending. That Alison’s character was such a douchebag that I was happy she was pulled down to Hell. I hope she was suffering every day down there. So yes, happy ending indeed!”
- “She basically tried to blame her boss every time the demon encountered her and it was so annoying. She just wasn’t as good a person as she thought she was.”
Look, we all have our own opinions and we are certainly entitled to them, but how could anyone think that Christine deserved to spend her afterlife being tortured in Hell? You may need to watch that final scene again to refresh your memory:
To be clear: no one (save for Hitler and maybe a couple of other historical figures on that level of evil) deserves this fate. Let’s assume for a moment that Christine was a Grade-A megabitch. Even then, she wouldn’t really deserve a fate like this. It would be easier to accept and laugh at, but even Heather Chandler herself didn’t deserve to down a mug full of drain cleaner. And she was the worst.
If one were to (literally) play Devil’s advocate, then one would need to look at the aforementioned charges brought up against Ms. Brown:
- She shouldn’t have rejected Mrs. Ganush’s request for a third extension on her mortgage.
- She was selfish for wanting to live and she was self-centered in that she only cared about her own survival.
- She killed her kitten.
It’s that last one that really gets many of you going, so I’ll save it for last. First: was it wrong of Christine to deny Mrs. Ganush her request for a third extension on her mortgage? Sure. It was morally wrong and a bit mean-spirited. Mrs. Ganush had exhausted her income when “the sickness took [her] eye.” That being said, have none of you ever been stuck between a rock and a hard place in order to advance in work? If you’ve been in the same position for a significant period of time with no advancement in your place of employment, it can be a bit frustrating. Christine was even cornered into this decision by her boss (the always great David Paymer), who basically told her she wouldn’t get the promotion if she didn’t shut Ganush down. It’s a shitty thing to do, but does she deserve to burn in Hell for this decision? Not at all. It’s not like she slapped the hag and kicked her out the door for everyone to laugh at her. She made a bold career move and that’s it.
Second: is Christine selfish for wanting to live and for caring solely about her own survival? Many times in Drag Me to Hell, Christine tries to throw other people to the Lamia. From her insistence at the séance that her boss put her in this position to her legitimately trying to send Mrs. Ganush to Hell (after failing to do the same to her obnoxious co-worker Stu), Christine certainly makes a case against herself. Still, would none of you do the same thing? If it were coming down to the wire and you were faced with being dragged to Hell or sending anyone else there in your place, wouldn’t you pick anyone else? Maybe you are more selfless than I am, but in the heat of the moment you are capable of making any kind of decision. As mentioned before, no one deserves this fate, but Christine (again) is being forced into a decision. Mrs. Ganush didn’t have to curse Christine. She made the choice out of spite, and if anything that makes her worse (and arguably more deserving of this fate) than Christine.
Lastly, does Christine deserve to burn in Hell for all eternity for killing her cat? Look, I get it! Killing a pet is basically the worst thing you could ever do in a movie (or real life). I’ve got a 2-year-old dog that, I kid you not, I would take a bullet for, but are you really telling me that you wouldn’t sacrifice any animal in order to save yourself from eternal damnation? Christine may have acted a little too quickly (she could have gone to her family farm and slaughtered a pig, for instance), but she wasn’t thinking clearly. After all, at this point in the film she had just been air-molested by the Lamia and was feeling pretty desperate. I’m not excusing the cat-killing, I’m just saying that it doesn’t condemn her to Hell.
This may be a controversial statement, but those who believe that Christine deserves her fate only think that they feel that way. Those select few are rationalizing their feelings over losing a character who had not committed any sort of grave sin. What do you do when an innocent character is dealt the cruelest punishment in cinema history? You convince yourself that she somehow deserved it. “She killed a helpless kitten!,” you cry. “She was being mean to that vindictive gypsy who was granted two extensions on her mortgage and probably deserved to be thrown out of her house!,” you say. I call shenanigans! There is no way any of you really, truly believe that Christine had this coming to her.
Let’s open the floor for discussion. Are you one of the select view that thinks Christine Brown was a selfish, horrible character who had it coming? Or are you on the opposing side of the argument and actually empathize with Ms. Brown? Let me know in the comments below or Tweet me if you really want to get into it!
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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