Rebel angels are cast into hell but weren't cast in the movie.

To Sartre, hell was other people. To Sam Raimi, it’s the usual Christian version: fire, brimstone, anguished wails of the eternally damned—you get the picture, or will if you catch Drag Me to Hell.

Raimi’s newest feature film is a crackerjack horror/comedy, a knowingly schlocky, visually inventive movie as creepy, disgusting, goofy, and hilarious as his seminal, psychotronic Evil Dead trilogy. If you liked those flicks, you’ll probably love this one. In it, a goodhearted loan officer gets on the bad side of an elderly Hungarian woman, who proceeds to curse the poor girl. For three days she’ll be stalked, scared, and totally grossed out by a vengeful demon. On the fourth day, she’ll be—you guessed it—dragged to hell.

Which got us wondering: How did the aforementioned version of hell enter our popular imagination, and why has it stayed there for so long? For answers, we turned to Terrence Reynolds, chairman of Georgetown University’s Department of Theology.

According to Reynolds, the Bible’s not to blame. In fact, he says, Scripture is notably light on infernal images, mainly referencing hell as a place of suffering “populated by those who have fallen from Grace,” a realm “where God is absent” and “one finds oneself in a state of loss.” The abiding, detailed notions of hell, he says, probably owe more to literary populizers Dante and Milton, whose Divine Comedy (especially The Inferno) and Paradise Lost, respectively, have been the hallmarks of afterlife woe since each was published in the 14th century.

As for why they’ve stuck with us for so long, Reynolds chalks it up to faith that hell is a real place—and also to human nature. “In a world where the evil often prosper and the good suffer,” he says, “the idea of hell provides some notion of retribution and recompense. It satisfies the human urge for divine justice.”

That makes sense. What doesn’t is Raimi’s soul-taker—a barely glimpsed, cloven-hoofed, goat-horned thing called a “lamia” … which confusingly shares a name with the child-eating, blood-sucking, snake-tailed demoness of Greek mythology. Or the movie's spiritual medium, an Indian fellow who dives headfirst into the demon-banishment business, even though his fortune-teller’s shop is filled with Hindu iconography and New Age music. Or at least one of the casting choices: Justin Long—aka “the Mac guy”—as the too-good-to-be-true boyfriend.

Could the real hell be Hollywood casting?

—Jeremy Berlin

Art: William Blake, The Casting of the Rebel Angels into Hell, illustration for John Milton's Paradise Lost, 1808, pen and watercolor on paper

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