Headscratchers / Drag Me to Hell

As a Headscratchers subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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• Christine spurts half a pint of blood from her nose at work, and everyone acts like she's being rude rather than calling 911 and getting her an ambulance. Her boss is only concerned with having gotten some of her blood in his mouth. Clearly, Christine has suffered a serious injury (like a brain tumor that just burst) and her life is in danger. Even if everyone at work is unfeeling and totally professional they should still care. If she dies, then the bank could most likely be sued by Christine's relatives.
  • There are theories that most of the horror of the movie is all in Christine's head, and that scene is part of the evidence.
  • On the other hand, the scene goes on VERY quick, Christine spurts the blood and immediately runs away. The tepid reaction of her coworkers could be simply out of shock and surprise.
• So wait, if the person holding the button is the one that gets dragged down to hell, then why wasn't it Clay that got dragged down instead of Christine?
  • Up until the very end, that's exactly what I thought was gonna happen.
  • It's not the person holding the button that gets dragged to Hell, it's the button's owner. Hence the reason she had to give it to someone else as a gift, rather than just flushing it down the toilet.
• Why doesn't Rham Jas just give Christine all three of her options at once? She would have had a lot more time to choose a course of action that way.
  • He did think the first choice would work and the last one was a Sadistic Choice.
  • She did ask him this directly, and he responds by saying that he didn't want to be complicit in sending a soul to hell. He only told Christine she could give away the button when this became a last resort.
• Minor nitpick, but the Wikipedia article mentions that the train is "barrelling towards [Christine]". So a train is charging through a major terminal station (Los Angeles Union) at, most likely, a very unsafe speed. Surely the engineer would know the speed limits? If, over in England, a train ran at high speed through a major station like Exeter St Davids or Southampton Central, both of which have tight speed limits and are required stops for all passenger trains, there would be major repercussions.
  • In my city when a train isn't making a stop (they call them express trains here) it barrels through the station very quickly.
  • Aren't all passenger trains supposed to stop at Los Angeles Union though?
  • I wouldn't know, i should have specified earlier that i am from New York City.
  • As a major train station, all passenger routes going that way stop at LAUS. Given she was heading to Santa Barbara, the train would not have been travelling at that speed in real life, and indeed, would have been entering Union Station backwards, so the locomotive appearing first would not be accurate either.
  • It's a Plot Hole. Los Angeles Union has no through tracks, a train at that speed is about to have a very unpleasant accident.
• So, Mrs. Ganush has no money to make payments on her loan, and goes to the bank to get an extension. Christine doesn't give it to her, thus gets cursed for her selfish (from Mrs. Ganush's view) ways. But, when Ganush is dead, her house is filled with extended Roma stereotypes/family who are merrily feasting and cavorting. Could they not scrape together to make a payment on her house after two extensions? Why is it that their failure to help Ganush is overlooked but Christine's gets her dragged to Hell?
  • Maybe Ganush's family will all be going to Hell too — they just aren't under a curse to take them right away and will have to wait until they die.
  • I'd say it's for the same reason she didn't want to go live with her granddaughter: She doesn't want to be dependent on anybody.
    • That changes the context of the entire situation, because that means Ganush is punishing Christine for not indulging her in a sinful level of pride. Ganush really can't afford to pay her loan even after an extension; Christine may have been motivated by greed in that she wanted to look good at her job, but that doesn't mean that giving Ganush the extension was the correct thing to do, either. If she really can't pay her bills and is using the loan extension as a way to maintain a facade of independence, while she has the option to live within her means but refuses because it would mean humbling herself before her family, then Ganush isn't in a morally-superior position to be cursing Christine in the first place.
    • Isn't that the point though? How could a morally superior person possibly do this in the first place? They are literally sentencing someone to an eternity in burning in hell with zero context of the person's life. That's pretty textbook evil stuff.
• I read somewhere that this movie apparently has some kind of anorexia subtext. Um... can someone explain that, please? Cause I'm not seeing it beyond the mention that Christine used to be fat (Then again, I only saw the movie a while ago...)
  • Well, from what I recall, the anorexia theory was based around the fact that most all of the gross things that happen to Christine involve her getting something in her mouth/being force-fed (the dream!Ganush pukes worms in her mouth, the shed!Ganush's eye flying into her mouth, corpse!Ganush spits corpse juice into her mouth, etc) and the fact that the only times we see her eat either turn the food into something disgusting (at the dinner) or treat it as an act of defeat (the ice cream binge and the sundaes at the diner). There's also a small moment when she passes a pastry shop near the beginning and has to stop herself from going in.
    • There's also Mrs. Ganush's dirty yellow nails, her false dentures and Christine getting her hair pulled out. Eating disorders can cause hair, teeth and nails to decay.
    • There are also several references to Christine having been a chubby child, including a photo of her as the Pork Queen at her local fair. Mrs Ganush's granddaughter even taunts Christine about it, saying; "You used to be a real fat girl, didn't you? I can tell." There's a hint that Christine either has/had an eating disorder, or has worked very hard indeed to become slim.
• What pisses me off about this movie is the when that young woman said Christine deserves whatever comes to her. Does she know about the curse? If so, what kind of bullshit is that to damn someone to hell when not was Ganush pushing her chances but was the one who set herself up for shame in the first place?
  • The kind this whole movie centers on — Disproportionate Retribution.
  • That woman's grandmother had just died and a total stranger had knocked her corpse out of its casket. She was not going to be in a forgiving mood.
• The goal of the seance seems to be to get the lamia into the goat and then kill the goat to send it away. So why isn't the guy with the machete sitting right next to the goat with his machete raised ready to kill it as soon as the lamia goes into it? The lamia escapes because he wasn't ready.
  • Shock, one supposes. Being told that a demon is going to possess a goat and do freaky things is one thing, even believing it is one thing, actually seeing it happen is another. But probably more importantly, because Sam Raimi wasn't done with his torturing of the voodoo doll Christine at that point.
• Why is the concept of God absent from this movie? No matter what your religion is, the plot revolves around a curse where a demon drags you to hell. Yet not only does Christine not consider going to an exorcist, but also the name of God isn't even invoked during the failed exorcism sequence. I don't even think the word "god" is used at all in the movie. So why was it absent, when in other situations of demons people might call a priest or something?
  • Rham Jas references God in his first scene when he's arguing with Clay. Jas quotes Carl Jung, Clay makes a quip about Jung being a "new ager's favorite psychologist," and Jas responds "Because he wasn't afraid to bring God into the equation." To this troper, that's felt like Raimi leaning on the fourth wall about the lack of God in the movie. Perhaps he's saying that if God had been brought into the equation of Christine's story, things would have turned out differently, or perhaps he's taking Jas's perspective and cynically responding to it. Either way, the involvement of God is directly referenced in dialogue.
  • If I had to take a guess, it's because Sam Raimi is most likely an atheist and doesn't believe in God, so the thought that Christine could get help from the church never crossed his mind. However, Hell is convenient to telling the story, so it still exists.
  • Devil, but No God.
  • In the opening scene the medium was asking for the help and blessing of the "santo padre" (holy father). And later when she quite effectively (but unfortunately, only temporarily) manages to banish the Lamia, in her chanting it cab be heard "venceremos con la sangre del cordero" (we will defeat it with the blood of the lamb), something that has obvious religious meaning.
  • Some religions have hells but do not have God, Buddhism for example.
• We are supposed to believe that Sylvia is the same person that at the start, 'doomed a little boy to Hell FOR A NECKLACE and then think that she is right in cursing Christine? Sam Raimi, have you lost your goddamn mind?
  • In fiction Gypsies are right twats. It's not just in Drag Me to Hell, in Stephen King's Thinner they do roughly the same thing. Buffy the Vampire Slayer's gypsies flat out admit they serve vengeance NOT justice. So ultimately I'd chalk it up Gypsies are jerks.
  • I think you missed the part that Sylvia is actually the villain of the story, Raimi isn’t trying to make us think she is in any way right, all the opposite.
    • Except Raimi has stated the exact opposite and that he does think Christine deserved Hell for not giving infinite extensions on the loan.
    • What Raimi said is that Christine is a good person who consciously chose to commit a sin, and had to deal with the consequences of said choice. He also said the punishment was too hard, but nonetheless deserved. That Mrs. Ganush is such a horrid human being is irrelevant, a villain can be the victim too. Doing a comparision, in the first Spider-man movie Aunt May is in pretty much the same situation, and we all thought that the banker was an asshole and that she was the poor victim. Again, Ganush *is* a horrible person, but Christine didn't know that, and she still chose to evict a senior citizen begging for help simply because it would help her to get a promotion.
      • The lady had already been given two extensions on her loan. She'd already been given her second chance twice over and had not payed the loan bank. She decided to take her vengeance out on society on a bank teller when the bank had already helped her out, twice when they did not need to but it was absolutely clear she would not pay and her reaction to being rejected was murder.
    • We’re not supposed to think anything, the movie is willingly morally ambiguous, nor Ganush is presented as outright or purely evil nor Christine is presented as the goody goody. Some movies just do that. On the other hand is nowhere established that Ganush was the one that cursed the kid at the beginning. I personally just took that the movie was showing a previous incident of the curse being use, in fact considering that the kid and family were clearly Hispanics speaking in Spanish I even assume it was somewhere in Latin Land probably unrelated to Ganush (and yes, there are gypsies in Latin America in case you wonder).
• There is something I don't get about the whole "it's alll in her head" theory: What about the opening scene, with the kid that too got dragged to hell?
  • It was all in his head too.
    • So how do you explain the medium who witnessed the kid going to Hell recalling the incident 40 years later?
• If the goal is to quickly kill the goat after the demon enters its body, why not properly restrain it so it can't dodge the machete like it does? Or if not that, why even use a machete since it requires you to be right next to a demon and may not immediately kill the animal even if you don't miss, as opposed to something safer and more instant like a gun, or even a bow & arrow?
  • I got the impression that machete guy was trying his best, but was too freaked out by there being an actual demon doing freaky demon things. Presumably in an ideal situation he wouldn't have missed.
• Christine just immediately opts for stabbing her own kitten to death as the sacrifice? Why not just go buy a goldfish from the pet store, or trap a mouse or something similar, or even just squash a bug? It's not like it has to be an animal she cares about, right?
  • Remember that some freaky goat-demon is right outside her home scaring the living daylights out of her. Going outside is going to seem like a bad idea in that instance.
• If Christine wants to get rid of the curse, and maybe get some revenge, why not just give the button to Ganush's family?
  • She was on a pretty strict time limit, and how would she introduce herself anyway? "Hello, I'm the woman who foreclosed on your elderly relative's house. Here, have this button"?