Our friends and Dead Central and Bloody Disgusting were treated to a treat of all treats recently, as they got to be guests on the set of Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell. They were lucky enough to witness the filming of the climactic scene; a seance sequence to battle the curse of the gypse on Christine Brown (Alison Lohman). Lohman explains her characters situation:
“I play Christine Brown; she’s a loan officer, and she has to make this very fateful decision at her bank. This old elderly woman comes in who wants an extension on her loan. Her house is foreclosing on her. In any normal situation I would have given her the extension, but I wanted to get this promotion from my manager, and I choose not to give it her. So, she puts a curse on me.”
The exteriors for the home in which the seance is being held were taken at historic Doheny Mansion in Pasadena, CA. The interior of the room was built on a huge concrete soundstage. The set only took nine weeks to fully build and dress.
“At its most active, we had a crew of seventy-five carpenters, painters, and riggers all working at the same time. We had planned this set from the very beginning of the movie.” Says Production designer Steve Saklad (Spider-Man 2, The Quick and the Dead). “There are Moorish designs in the window glass; on the floor there is a giant Moorish star. There are some scenes from high overhead that look down at the floor, and we see this grand sort of sunburst, a Moorish design. We’ve also mixed in French influences and Turkish influences to be this bridge across cultures. This one room is supposed to be built over the intersection of all of these supernatural forces.”
Dileep Rao, who jumped right from the set of James Cameron’s Avatar to Drag Me, plays Rham Jas, a seer who helps Christine understand what is happening to her and how to battle it. Rao compares the two experiences, and says that Drag Me is just a complex. “This is not a simple scene,” he says with a smile. “This is like the most epically complicated scene. This is sort of like [AVATAR]. We have to take these little pieces and do that like that over and over again. [Raimi] adds color to each dot and when its done we step back and see it in the end.”
The scene takes place in the home of Shaun San Dena (Adrianna Barraza), who has had experience with this curse and demon before. She opens up her traumatic past to help the young Christine.
Bloody Disgusting gives us an idea of how crazy the set must have been. “Within these walls the wild seance scene is being pulled together. There are goats (two real and one robotic), people flying on wirework and, well, demons, of course.”
Check out some pics from the scene below!
[...] I wanted to ask about a shot in Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me To Hell.” A young woman is dragged down into a hellish hole between some railroad tracks. I understand that [...]