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With
Guillermo del Toro set to direct back-to-back installments of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The
Hobbit, Sam Raimi
is free to revisit his horror roots with Drag Me to Hell, a thriller he wrote with his
brother, Ivan Raimi. The pair, who last collaborated on Spider-Man
3, wrote the script for their latest
slice of supernatural terror more than a decade ago, on the heels of 1992’s Army
of Darkness. It will
mark Raimi’s directorial debut for Ghost House, the production company he
founded six years ago with fellow filmmaker Rob Tapert.“Sam calls
it a ‘spook-a-blast,’ a wild ride with all the chills and spills that Evil
Dead delivered,
without relying on the excessive violence of that film,” Tapert told Variety.
“When one has done three very expensive movies, they get used to eating caviar.
Sam will have to ponder what it means to come down from the mountaintop for a
moment. “The
appeal to Sam on Drag Me to Hell was
returning to what he had once done and loved
doing, which was entertaining a very specific group of fans and providing a
roller-coaster ride for them. He doesn't have the enormous pressure here that
goes with handling a hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars franchise.” Joining
Raimi for his first post-Spiderman adventure
will be Oscar-nominated Juno star
Ellen Page, who will play the
victim of a dreaded curse in Hell.
It will be her first role since her breakthrough
turn as a teenager struggling through an unexpected pregnancy; for Raimi, who
had been considered a candidate to direct New Line’s Lord
of the Rings prequels, it will be a prelude to
Ghost House’s long-awaited remake of his horror classic The
Evil Dead.
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