Laugh now, pay later: Björk Guðmundsdóttir and Catherine Deneuve in Dancer in the Dark

Sam Raimi’s films present themselves as exercises in cinematic pleasure. They are a different kind of emotional manipulation, one where our physical responses manifest as shudders and guffaws of equal measure. His Evil Dead films are spirited genre exercises that exploit, to wonderful effect, the filmic device of time-based tension building, trademarks of physical comedy and slasher suspense. What makes these films so special is their ability to seamlessly merge these disparate genres into a fantastical scene of horror and hilarity. Drag Me To Hell continues in this vein, but with slightly higher stakes after the Spider-Man trilogy. The Evil Dead films are farcical slashers that trafficked in the age-old good vs. evil dichotomy – to an immensely pleasurable comedic effect. Later in his career, Raimi would begin to grey out this black-and-white premise, most successfully in his recent Spider-Man 2 and now with Drag Me To Hell.