“Drag Me to Hell” defies all expectations and current practice in the almost-always disappointing world of the PG-13 horror film. That risible concept, the scary movie as family-friendly outing, gets a nose-thumbing from this new entry by “Evil Dead” guy Sam Raimi.
Because in addition to the typical arsenal of jolts and jumps and shock cuts — usually all you can expect from the tween horror genre — this movie has a not-often-played card up its sleeve: drool. In fact, it’s safe to say that it’s the gnarliest, mucus-iest movie of 2009 so far, with few other contenders looking to out-goo it before year’s end.
That big brown mushroomy ghost thingy that belches its way out of the mouth of the dead boy in “The Haunting in Connecticut?” Kid’s stuff compared to the revolting items leaving and entering human bodies in this film.
I notice this sort of thing. Obviously, I’m paid to do that. But I notice it not just because it’s my job. Gross stuff is a lifelong interest of mine.
It started when I saw “The Blob” on television as a child. Not the ’80s remake. The old one. I was about 6 years old and, more than any other movie monster I’d seen up to that point, “The Blob” disturbed me in a way that gave me actual nightmares.
Because it was conceivable that you could hide yourself away in an underground bunker or a monster-repellent radioactive cave or a secret fort built from a cardboard box in your room and then you’d be safe from those other messengers of death. But the Blob would find you.
It could ooze under the door or into the sink pipes or in through a crack in a window. Its power lied in its blobbiness. You can’t contain or stop something like that. It’s like a runny nose hellbent on murder. You can keep as many tissues nearby as you want. You’ll never escape its oozing grossness.
This is the blob on crack“Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster” was my next fixation. Hedora (that’s the Smog Monster’s real Japanese name — it’s important to be correct about these things) was a mound of squishy black sludge, like a liquefied, building-tall mass of that muck you’d scrape from the floor of a public school bus. So toxic that it grows eyes and a consciousness, Hedora wipes out entire discotheques full of go-go dancers before heroic Gojira (Japanese for Godzilla) comes to take him down.
I was fixated on that particular Godzilla film because it seemed like, in the early ’70s, with its focus on “the ecology” and crying Native Americans in PSAs about littering running on a nearly constant loop in the national imagination, that if a monster were going to exist in real life, it might be that one. And I was already a little flipped out by the Blob. Hedora was like the Blob’s bigger, badder, blobbier foreign-exchange student best friend.
And it didn’t have to be contained in a horror film to make me take notice. Watching Burgess Meredith cut open Sylvester Stallone’s puffy eyelid in “Rocky” is the most indelible memory I took away from that film when I first saw it at age 12.
Before that it was Robert Shaw gurgling out his own blood as Jaws bit him in half. And back then, the real actors seemed to know that if you spit up a little something extra then somehow that meant you were really going for broke. Jane Fonda’s snot-dripping nose in “Klute”; or Gene Hackman’s saliva-intensive howl of anguish as he clutches dead Shelly Winters in “The Poseidon Adventure.” The guy spit all over that poor woman. The Academy, feeling appropriately sorry for Winters, nominated her instead.
As I got older I graduated to really nasty gorefests. It was inevitable. But over time I came to understand that though blood and guts have their charms and I’d never turn them down, a person comes to expect that sort of thing from a film called “Corpse Grinders” or “Blood Freak.” I found that for all my enjoyment of a good head severing or zombie brains buffet, my fascination with earlier oozing goo from outer space or toxic waste from Japan had become a weirder fixation in which, as an audience member, I was most freaked out and shocked by the unexpected use of various sputa.
Highbrow gooAnd exposure to highbrow arthouse films that took discomfort even farther only solidified my show-me-show-me/no-don’t-don’t-don’t aesthetic: “Salo,” “Pink Flamingos,” all the disgusting David Cronenberg movies but especially “The Fly” and “The Brood,” with its mutant children birthed from bursting sacs of goop.
And then Todd Haynes’ “Poison” spent part of its running time detailing the leprosy-like condition of a scientist before upstaging itself with a creepy, slow-motion scene of some very Jean Genet-like prisoners spitting into the mouth of a bullied inmate. I know, yuck. But again, 18 years after its release, that’s the go-to image in my mind when that film gets discussed. I’d graduated from being scared of the blob to being scared of… saliva.
And I realized, while watching “Drag Me to Hell,” with a packed house a couple weeks ago, that I’m not alone in my fascinated repulsion. Because here’s a movie about a woman who is being chased by a spirit that wants to cast her into a lake of fire, an everlasting furnace, eternal damnation and the audience seemed to be most horrified by a pair of brown-tinged dentures covered in slimy spit, hawked out of the mouth of a gruesome old Gypsy woman.
Later, some freakish biting moments and scenes of increasingly unpleasant and unexpected materials being barfed up by various characters elicited the loudest shrieks and groans. Again, spittle: 1, actual Hell: 0.
In other words, creatures from outer space or the spirit world will make us jump for a second and maybe spill our popcorn, but when it counts nothing terrifies us like our own bodies.
Dave White is the film critic for Movies.com and the author of “Exile in Guyville.” Find him at www.imdavewhite.com.