10. Sam Raimi Tortures Alison Lohman With Fake Vomit Drag Me To Hell
Sam Raimi is unique in the horror film genre thanks to his stylistic flair. Namely, the bloke loves himself some kitsch, and isnt exactly backward about showing you this. His early Evil Dead films didnt draw from the psychological horror well which would eventually become so popular it drew its inspiration from the sort of shocks you might get at a haunted house theme park ride. Namely, you knew you were going to be scared, but you had humour as a catharsis afterward. This sort of holy-balls-that-was-ridiculous reaction to scares was once again ready-and-apparent in Drag Me To Hell, Raimis 2009 effort and first stab at horror after 20 years on more mainstream projects. Drag Me To Hell was all about a regular woman being terrified haunted-house-at-a-carnival style by a gypsy sorceress who foists a demon on her for shaming her over her finances. It required lead actress Alison Lohman to look shocked, surprised and sickened as a variety of things not for the squeamish happened to her character, and she had to make this come across well. In order to 'help' her, Raimi borrowed from his Evil Dead directing playbook. Namely, he terrified her for real, taking her through her own carnival ride and filming the result. With little more scene-setting than bad stuffs going to happen to you, Raimi threw the metaphorical kitchen sink at Lohman, giving her food with fake maggots in (actually pasta), throwing bucketloads of fake blood at her and making her fight in a muddy grave, with mudpacks Lohman was allergic to. She was also rocketed into a ceiling at some point, and got so run down that she actually caught the shingles. Yet Raimis crowning glory came when Lohman had to wrestle an animated corpse at a funeral setting(!). Though this was a comic scene after all, shes wrestling a corpse he wanted the actress to be actually disgusted by the animatron, so resolved to fill its mouth with fake sick and not tell her about it until it threw up all over her. The look of sickened shock you see on her face when this happens? Thats Lohmans real reaction, miffed that Raimi had conned her
again.