I haven’t had such fun contemplating the loss of my soul since I don’t know when.  Drag Me To Hell is an absolute hoot:  Sam Raimi’s first horror film in a while is tremendous stuff, a chance for the director to let his hair down outside the constraints of the Spider-Man franchise and do what he does so well.

It’s a grisly comic of the old school, the EC ones that critics reckoned were such a pernicious influence on America’s youth and that probably formed part of the Raimi brothers’ reading material.  The brothers wrote the film together, and the story is pretty simple; it’d be a shame to overanalyse it in an attempt to make it more grown up…you’re missing the point if that’s where your thoughts are headed.

Alison Lohman plays a young woman who works at a bank, eager to get a promotion not just because of the money but because she’s overheard her boyfriend’s snooty mother be dismissive of her and that won’t do.  The opening sequence neatly depicts all this and leads to her turning down an old gypsy lady’s plea for mercy regarding being behind with her mortgage.  Well, I don’t know what it is they say about not messing with old gypsy ladies, but this particular one puts a curse on Lohman, that will result in her soul being gobbled up by a demon in a few days time.  Whoops.

You’d like to think that at a time like this, a woman can rely on her boyfriend.  But Lohman’s is a professor of psychology, who will have no truck with talk of gypsy curses and demons.  This he makes plain to the Indian psychic his beloved consults for advice about her predicament.  His fashionable rationalism is no use when it comes to matters of the heart or beyond the grave, and he ends up ponying up a hefty chunk of change for Lohman to return to the guru, this time backed up by a woman who has met the demon before and wants to take it down: this thing is personal.

It’s a straightforward enough tale, but delivered with panache in every respect.  The images and edits work a treat, everything timed to perfection to ensure that the shocks keep a-comin’.  And if it’s not visual unpleasantness like nosebleeds with the force of garden hoses, or eyeballs appearing in cakes, then it’s more conceptual stuff, as when our heroine has to despatch her beloved kitty in an attempt to throw the demon off her scent.

No such luck.  She offs the kitty and still the demon heads in her direction, even though the gypsy woman who pointed it at her is by now dead.  And Mrs Ganush’s death provides what Lohman hopes is a get-out clause in her relationship with the thing from the pit.  Only, this being the sort of tale it is, things don’t work out the way she had in mind…

It’s brilliantly executed stuff that brings to mind Spielberg for the way it delivers thrills and spills with cleverly thought through visual storytelling.  The whole is more than capably delivered, and if it feels somewhat insubstantial then…well, just deal with it ok?  Not every story has to have a message.  And this one probably does, even if it’s a fairly straightforward one about not foreclosing on property deals with women who clearly dabble in the dark arts.  As morality tales go, it might not have the depth of Sophie’s Choice, but it’s got a certain something.