Drag Me to Hell – A Lesson for Ambitious Women Everywhere

After seeing the astonishingly good reviews for Sam Raimi’s new horror film Drag Me to Hell, I decided to check it out this weekend because I do love me a good scary movie and nothing worth seeing in the genre has come out in such a long time. It has been hailed as “hilarious” and a “roller coaster thrill ride” and I was anxious to see what all the fuss was about. What I got instead was to witness an hour and a half of the brutal punishment – and ultimate damnation – of a woman for the crime of trying to advance her career.
The main character, Christine Brown, is a loan officer at a local bank branch who has a lot of reasons to want to get ahead. She comes from a rural background and seems to have a lot of insecurities about being a “farm girl.” She also used to be fat, and she is portrayed as being having a deep and constant disgust for all things from her past. She is even shown trying to remove all traces of her country dialect from her speech. Furthermore, she is dating a man who is a new professor, and she feels pressure to impress his family by being an accomplished business woman. The assistant manager’s position at her bank is vacant, and she seems desperate to get the promotion over a male co-worker who is also in the running. So, when her boss tells her that she is not the front-runner because she often chooses to be generous and giving rather than making the “tough decisions” that will benefit the bank, she takes it very much to heart. Especially after her boss and her competition for the job send her to fetch their sandwiches for them at lunch time.

She is immediately presented with an opportunity to flex her “tough decision” muscle when an old woman who is presented as a disgusting, decrepit and sickly gypsy (a lot more issues right there) comes in asking for an extension on her loan in order to avoid being kicked out of her house. Christine’s first instinct is to help her, but then she remembers the fire in her belly and after consulting her boss (and getting a reminder about “tough decisions”) she chooses to deny the woman her third extension, thereby basically evicting her. The woman starts to beg, Christine refuses, she gets hostile and is escorted out by security. Christine is praised for the way she handles the situation by her boss.

That’s when shit really starts to go downhill. The old woman – who now becomes the villain of the story, what a surprise – waits for Christine after work, tries to kill her in her car, and then curses Christine with what we find out is the lamia, which is a curse that summons a goat from hell to torture and eventually take the soul of the cursed victim. The rest of the movie is Christine trying to fight off demons and getting physically and mentally tortured, vomited on and scared shitless before eventually being “dragged to hell.”

The moral of the story? Women, don’t try to get ahead. Don’t try to fight your “womanly” tendency to be giving and empathetic for the sake of your career. Cause you know what will happen? You will be destroyed. Your soul will literally be taken to hell, where it obviously belongs if you sacrifice it on the altar of ambition instead of accepting your tiny place in the world. While not as gory as its recent predecessors in the genre like Saw, Drag me to Hell it is horrifying and the not-so-subtle inclusion of humor in the torture scenes made it all the more a slap in the face to me as a woman. I’m kind of appalled at this thinly-veiled cautionary tale for women who dare to be ambitious and I would love to hear your opinions about it.