‘Drag Me to Hell’ an ‘Eyeball-Gouging Lesson’ in the Spook Genre

Sam Raimi horror click ‘Drag Me to Hell’ an ‘eyeball-gouging lesson’ in the spook genre

A woman fights to keep demons from taking her soul. With Alison Lohman, Justin Long. Director: Sam Raimi. (1:36) PG-13: Gore. At area theaters.

Attention, hordes of hacks making scary films as a way of joining the Hollywood food chain: this is how it’s done.

“Drag Me to Hell” is an eyeball-gouging lesson in how to make a genre flick and live to tell about it.

It’s not flawless, but it’s vulnerabilities don’t linger because director Sam Raimi truly believes in what he’s doing — whipping up a fun, fat-free spookfest that feels like a maggot-filled meal even at 96 minutes.

Christine (Alison Lohman) is a young, mildly driven loan officer at a Los Angeles bank hoping for a promotion.

To prove she’s management material, Christine goes against her gut and for the bank’s bottom line by turning down a weird old lady (Lorna Raver) trying to refinance her mortgage and save her home.

Yet the glass-eyed gypsy woman — who in the 1940s could have been played by famous scare-aracter actress Maria Ouspenskaya — is the wrong coot to wrong.

Thrown out by security, she attacks Christine like a hellhound and lays a curse on her: After three days of haunting, Christine’s soul will become demon chow.

No sooner is this explained by a storefront mystic (Dileep Rao) than the shadow beasts, talking animals and creepy upchucks start. Christine hopes a séance will work. She clearly needs to see more séances.

There’s an aerobicized kick to the script Raimi and his brother Ivan cooked up, similar to the one they gave the overanalyzed “Spider-Man 3.” (The first two Spidey entries are more definitively Sam Raimi movies, and that whole blockbuster series would have been blander had he not been at the helm.)

The gore comes up so fast that Justin Long, as Christine’s boyfriend, mostly pops up to look incredulous, and her boss (David Paymer) to act hilariously jerky, even when covered in blood.

Lohman, still as winning as in “White Oleander” and “Matchstick Men,” fights the devils with every ounce of her tiny frame, and Raimi and cinematographer Peter Deming give the movie the same snappy visual punch as Raimi’s crucial ’80s B-movie “Evil Dead 2.”

As he’s matured as a filmmaker, Raimi’s dabbled in genre stuff less frequently, but as in “The Gift” (2001), the flashlight-in-the-camping-tent glee he takes in pulp plots combines nicely with his grown-up storytelling skills.

Here, that actually results in a few “Aww, why didn’t they show that?” moments. Ultimately, though, there’s enough wild chills in “Drag Me to Hell” to choke a goat.