Taking a well-deserved break from the Spider-Man franchise, director Sam Raimi screened his new horror flick Drag Me to Hell last night at the Cannes Film Festival. Shown here at this morning's press conference, where he had some fun with the festival's official name tags, Raimi joked further -- maybe -- about another bloody fest sensation making the rounds this week.
It doesn't feel like it was too long ago when the director, instead of headlining a presser, was roaming the market in the basement of the Palais, hoping to sell his seminal horror film Evil Dead. "I'm so excited to be back here," he said, flanked by Hell actors Alison Lohman and Justin Long. "I'm honored to be here; it says a lot about the artistic parameters of the festival committee to see them put merit in the horror genre."
When asked about the status of an Evil Dead remake, Raimi said not anytime soon. Pressing him, a Norwegian journalist noted the the Evil Dead remake already happened, and it was in the form of Lars von Trier's Antichrist. Raimi, who hasn't seen the film and knows little of the Danish auteur, said jokingly, without missing a beat: "I'd love to see Antichrist. And so would my attorney."
After nearly a decade at the helm of Hollywood blockbusters, Raimi enthused about returning to his own relatively small project. The timely story follows an L.A. loan officer, Christine Brown (Lohman), who denies a mortgage loan extension to old Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver). Bad move: Mrs. Ganush casts "the curse of the Lamia" on Brown. Damnation ensues.
"I love Spider-Man, but it's not intimate," Raimi said. "It's refreshing to work on this film. It's firsthand, immediate and a blast; and I've been reminded about the beauty of brevity."
But was there some grand plan to create a horror film based around the current mortgage meltdown? No, Raimi replied. "It's a simple morality tale, about how greed leads to destruction," he continued. "Our society is riddled with greed. We wrote it because it's real."