March
16
SXSW: Raimi Talks Drag Me to Hell
Universal debuted Sam Raimi's fantastic horror-fest Drag Me to Hell on Sunday night at a packed midnight show at the Paramount Theatre; I caught up with the director earlier in the day. "I feel the need to deliver no matter what the budget," confessed Raimi, who showed up in scruffy Austin wearing a suit and tie. "The audience has to laugh or it's a failure, jump or it's a failure, cheer or it's a failure. It's like a circus act, as opposed to showing fine art. It's the high art of entertaining an audience."
The director, who wrote Drag Me to Hell with his brother Ivan, has nothing to worry about. The audience was roaring with pleasurable disgust as various incarnations of a wicked-witch gyspy crone with evil eyes disgorged all sorts of mean nasty ugly things all over sweet ambitious loan agent Alison Lohman. While the movie is silly and over the top, the audience is in on the joke. (An invitation to a cabin the in the woods yields knowing groans.) It's great fun. It will make a mint.
A student of classic horror, Raimi pays homage to Robert Wise's The Haunting, not to mention Roman Polanski's Repulsion, as houses bulge and rumble, wind ominously ruffles leaves, and freaked out young Lohman (constantly left alone when she is in dire need of psychiatric care) whips out a butcher knife to sacrifice her "little kitty" in order to stave off a nasty bitch of a curse. I was slightly puzzled as to why Justin Long wasted his time playing Lohman's remarkably dull boyfriend; the answer eventually became clear.
What Raimi did, while he fussed over this movie in the editing room, was play with the sound. The music and sound effects manipulate us expertly; time and again the audience screeched with delight as bodies rose up from the road--accompanied by swells of wrenching violins--or popped up in the back seat.
"Sound is 50% of a movie," Raimi says. "The audience is not aware of how much they're affected by sound. A rough cut is so much worse than a finished film, after fine-tuning the editing and sound effects: dimensionality, continuation of characters, how dialogue is communicated through space. You step into a big close-up, start in the center speaker quietly with some echo in it, move left and right with a little sound, you're then filling the theater with a statement as the music swells. You have a moment!"
Raimi isn't done tinkering; he was mixing until late Saturday night and he's back on a plane at 7 AM Monday morning to return to the editing room, he says: "I'm hoping I'm in good shape for that mix."
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someone should write a book about you Anne- how you singlehandedly raised the bar on reporting about the business of the business with a complete understanding of the creative aspects. I remember a world where that didn't exist and I remember how you and Stuart set out to change that world - and you did!
Posted by: Nancy Nigrosh | March 16, 2009 at 12:11 PM
Get a fucking microphone! Sound is at least 50%!
Posted by: Mic | March 16, 2009 at 02:43 PM
Can't wait to see this movie!!
Posted by: molly | March 16, 2009 at 05:43 PM
true, true, no need to use profanity
Posted by: Jon Edwards | March 16, 2009 at 09:52 PM
Can't wait for this. Sam's been playing it straight for too long. This sounds like a true return to form!!
Posted by: Perry Lane | March 17, 2009 at 08:31 AM