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!
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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