Readers of /Film know that I’m a fan of wacky movie theories that make you reevaluate a film in much different light. Sometimes the theories are intended creations of the writer/director behind a film, but most times they are just fun interpretations created by the viewer (like this one). Either way, I always find them interesting and entertaining. Before you read this theory, take a deep breath — no one is saying that Raimi intended this interpretation — it’s meant to be fun.

/Film reader Steve M sent over an interesting theory he read over on IMDB. Micobiella thinks that Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell isn’t actually a horror movie, but instead a story of a farm girl with an eating disorder, who starves herself to fit a certain image and begins hallucinating and going crazy. Apparently you can watch the entire movie from this viewpoint, with few exceptions, and it all makes sens. Read the theory after the jump. Warning: Spoilers follow.

Allison Lohman’s character Christine Brown admits that her mother had an addiction, and at one point in the film we see an overweight photo of Christine as a child in front of a sign that read “SWINE QUEEN”. She doesn’t want to become addicted to food. She doesn’t want to be like her mother. At the beginning of the movie, she is listening to a tape trying to correct her southern accent. She doesn’t want to be a farm girl. She has a good boyfriend, and is trying to move her way up with a career at the bank.

She never touches food, because she is afraid it will make her fat and disgusting. According to the theory, there really isn’t a scary demon from hell, she’s just imagining everything. Hunger is making her irritable, she imagines the old woman’s creepy hand tapping on the desk when it was really just the other banker. Early in the film she passes out in her car and drives into a bunch of other cars in the parking lot. The woman from the bank never followed her, she imagined everything.

Frightened, Christine seeks a Psychic, whose explanation of “the old woman’s curse” manifests into her hallucinations. Also, the later exorcism wasn’t real (hence why the boyfriend wasn’t allowed to join in).

The food is a key factor in most of the hallucinations. Notice that when food is introduced on screen, Christine gets attacked by the spirit. Every time the spirit appears at her house, she is in the kitchen. When she locks the spirit outside of her room, see sees the spirit in the form of a shadow of Pig hooves.

AMS-4 says that her either purging or not eating is causes a nosebleed that “her sick mind sees as huge, as she attributes it to the curse, when deep inside she’s ashamed and afraid they’ll find out about her eating disorder.” At night she dreams like she’s being vomited onto, when it’s really her who’s throwing up in her bathroom. The sequence where she dreams that a fly enters her mouth and flies into her stomach is actually just her stomach growling while shes asleep. Her body needs food but she is unwilling to give in.

The old woman represents everything that an bulimic anxiety - she has no teeth, is hideous, and eats/steals the candy from her desk. Notice at the woman’s funeral that everyone is eating, drinking and gambling. The woman vomits on her and then shoves her arm down her throat as if taunting her to “eat, eat!” The one moment she’s “forced” to eat something in the film, she finds an eye staring back at her inside the cake, causing her to choke up her food.