Alright, I had to let Hunter Stephenson’s rather suspect LGBT theory at /Film, vis a vis Kevin from Pixar’s “Up,” slide earlier in the week. I’m not seeing it. However, this Peter Sciretta item (which references an IMDb message board post) drawing parallels between Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell” and eating disorders is a fascinating one that deserves the space.
Here’s a portion of the argument:
[IMDb commenter] Micobiella thinks that Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell isn’t actually a horror movie, but instead a story of a farm girl with an eating disorder, who starves herself to fit a certain image and begins hallucinating and going crazy. Apparently you can watch the entire movie from this viewpoint, with few exceptions, and it all makes sense…
Allison Lohman’s character Christine Brown admits that her mother had an addiction, and at one point in the film we see an overweight photo of Christine as a child in front of a sign that read “SWINE QUEEN”. She doesn’t want to become addicted to food. She doesn’t want to be like her mother. At the beginning of the movie, she is listening to a tape trying to correct her southern accent. She doesn’t want to be a farm girl. She has a good boyfriend, and is trying to move her way up with a career at the bank.
She never touches food, because she is afraid it will make her fat and disgusting. According to the theory, there really isn’t a scary demon from hell, she’s just imagining everything. Hunger is making her irritable, she imagines the old woman’s creepy hand tapping on the desk when it was really just the other banker. Early in the film she passes out in her car and drives into a bunch of other cars in the parking lot. The woman from the bank never followed her, she imagined everything…
The food is a key factor in most of the hallucinations. Notice that when food is introduced on screen, Christine gets attacked by the spirit. Every time the spirit appears at her house, she is in the kitchen. When she locks the spirit outside of her room, see sees the spirit in the form of a shadow of Pig hooves.
And so on and so forth. Intriguing.
It only occurred to me this week that I have yet to write about Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell,” which I saw weeks ago and never got around to reviewing in a timely fashion. I’ve had the artwork for whatever piece I was to conjur sitting here on my desktop, waiting for me to, you know, write the friggin’ words, but for whatever reason, the inspiration hasn’t hit.