Coming Soon
DRAG ME TO HELL
2009
Director
Sam Raimi
Starring
Alison Lohman
Justin Long
Lorna Raver
Dileep Rao
Runtime
99 minutes
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Our Squatters' Cinema series stands on its head in order to see things from the owners' perspective for a change. Little surprise, it's a goddamn nightmare! DRAG ME TO HELL represents the ultimate in eviction-related horror and stands as the only honest film about the 2008 housing crisis.
A loan officer (Alison Lohman), smothering her conscience to impress her boss, refuses to take pity on an ancient "G*psy" woman about to lose her home. The hag hisses a hex, and the banker's life plan is derailed by a chain of diabolical interventions that play like Seventeen magazine's "Embarrassing Moments" as written by Antonin Artaud. Desperate and fearful, the banker turns to mystical countermeasures to try and save her soul while evil forces work to push her to a breaking point.
DRAG ME TO HELL was director Sam Raimi's return to the illicit combination of Lovecraftian ichor and Hal Roach slapstick that made him a Fangoria star with the EVIL DEAD films. His old barreling camera and viscous ickiness are back. But here the standard tropes of the horror genre are repurposed to represent the emerging horrors of our dangerous new economic order - one in which uncertainty and risk are commodified, the reciprocity of credit is turned into "payback", and whose singular obsession with liquidity destroys social connections and renders whole populations vulnerable to ruin. This Grand Guignol gutbucket-horror allegory, operating with the karmic logic of E.C. Comics, is here to get revenge for the entire subprime mortgage meltdown.
"In Raimi's film, the formal mechanisms of suspense become an index of the somatic tolls of risk; the visual excesses of gore are now the signs of financial contagion and toxicity. Like the characterization of complex financial derivatives as 'Frankenstein's monsters,' Raimi's film draws on the traditions of horror to describe a new kind of terror—the deadliness of financialized debt and credit crisis. In so doing, DRAG ME TO HELL returns our attention to the original source of our fear, denaturalizing our acceptance of these new economic forms and systems and refusing any imaginative, psychic, or ideological solutions to the social contradictions that underwrite them." - Annie McClanahan, Post4
A loan officer (Alison Lohman), smothering her conscience to impress her boss, refuses to take pity on an ancient "G*psy" woman about to lose her home. The hag hisses a hex, and the banker's life plan is derailed by a chain of diabolical interventions that play like Seventeen magazine's "Embarrassing Moments" as written by Antonin Artaud. Desperate and fearful, the banker turns to mystical countermeasures to try and save her soul while evil forces work to push her to a breaking point.
DRAG ME TO HELL was director Sam Raimi's return to the illicit combination of Lovecraftian ichor and Hal Roach slapstick that made him a Fangoria star with the EVIL DEAD films. His old barreling camera and viscous ickiness are back. But here the standard tropes of the horror genre are repurposed to represent the emerging horrors of our dangerous new economic order - one in which uncertainty and risk are commodified, the reciprocity of credit is turned into "payback", and whose singular obsession with liquidity destroys social connections and renders whole populations vulnerable to ruin. This Grand Guignol gutbucket-horror allegory, operating with the karmic logic of E.C. Comics, is here to get revenge for the entire subprime mortgage meltdown.
"In Raimi's film, the formal mechanisms of suspense become an index of the somatic tolls of risk; the visual excesses of gore are now the signs of financial contagion and toxicity. Like the characterization of complex financial derivatives as 'Frankenstein's monsters,' Raimi's film draws on the traditions of horror to describe a new kind of terror—the deadliness of financialized debt and credit crisis. In so doing, DRAG ME TO HELL returns our attention to the original source of our fear, denaturalizing our acceptance of these new economic forms and systems and refusing any imaginative, psychic, or ideological solutions to the social contradictions that underwrite them." - Annie McClanahan, Post4