At last. The writer-director Sam Raimi has returned from the wilderness of blockbuster excess to his roots in electro-shock horror. Nearly three decades since his iconic debut, The Evil Dead, and after years as the champion of the phenomenally successful and only mildly soulless Spider-Man trilogy, Raimi returns with Drag Me to Hell, clutching an admittedly bigger bag of technical tricks but with a clearly renewed passion for screen terror.

Typically, there are self-evident similarities between Drag Me to Hell and The Evil Dead — spell books, incantations and demonic possessions abound in both. But the empathetic hook here is Raimi’s central character, Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), a conscientious loans officer recovering from a tough childhood, but one who is quietly ambitious and dreams of a happy future with her blue-blood boyfriend Clay Dalton (Justin Long).

When we first meet Christine she is listening to self-improvement tapes (“There is no friction with the proper diction!”) and hoping to snag an internal office promotion. She is given the chance to prove her professional mettle when a financially stricken Gypsy crone, Mrs Ganush (Lorna Raver), comes begging, in a timely plot device, for an extension on her failed mortgage repayments.

Mrs Ganush has a glass eye, crazy vampire teeth and regularly drips tendrils of sticky brown sputum from her withered lips. It’s not a good sign, but Christine, ever keen to succeed, rejects her desperate pleas. Mrs Ganush is outraged, and the resulting shot — a simple swift Gypsy head-turn and a mangled teeth-baring grimace, accompanied by a deafening sonic shock — is of the cardiac arrest variety, and sets the visceral tone for the subsequent nerve-jangling.

Christine, inevitably, is cursed by Mrs Ganush, condemned to 72 hours of torment at the hands of a goat-man spirit called the Lamia, who will eventually, as the title suggests, claim Christine for the underworld. Thus the rest of the movie is a series of immaculately timed frights, jolts and gross-out shocks (Mrs Ganush vomits gallons of writhing insects into Christine’s face) that punctuate our heroine’s attempt to rid herself of the curse. She consults a local seer, Rham Jas (Dileep Rao), takes part in a misfired exorcism and even, in a blackly comic highlight, performs unspeakably dark rites on her favourite kitty.

Written by Raimi and his brother Ivan, the movie is fundamentally a morality tale that channels the primal pull of the best fables. And certainly it’s this draw, rather than the gross gags and jump shocks, that keeps you transfixed, in horrified childlike awe, on Christine’s descent. One deliberately immoral action, the movie says with biblical authority, can send you straight to Hell. Christine’s battle to save herself is the battle between rationality and mysticism, free will and fate — the stuff of Jungian nightmares that is so effortlessly tapped here.

On the downside, Raimi is sometimes too fond of the cheap laugh. Giggling in the midst of fear is a merciful tension reliever, but Drag Me to Hell’s comedic moments often veer towards the cartoonish (in one scene Christine drops an anvil, Road Runner-style, on her tormentor). Elsewhere Raimi uses CGI effects where old-fashioned props would suffice. He has claimed to be inspired by classic horror movies such as The Exorcist, but in one distracting scene, in which Christine is momentarily drenched in computer- generated bile, you can’t help but wish that Raimi had opted for traditional pea soup.

Ultimately, these are minor irritants in a movie that is slickly accomplished in its own dark arts, and one that never once resorts to the recent nihilistic faddishness for torture-porn. It will be a huge hit. The re-invention of horror begins here.

15, 99 mins

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