Sam Raimi is certainly not the first filmmaker to have gotten his start making low-budget horror pictures before becoming a Hollywood big shot. But he is one of the few to have jumped headlong back into the breach -- not out of a need to rev up a stalled career but simply from desire.

Drag Me to Hell, which opens Friday, returns Raimi to his wild, zany roots of The Evil Dead, the relentless, no-budget 1981 blood-splattered classic about a group of people besieged by the undead in a remote cabin in the woods. Stephen King made that movie instantly famous (and earned it worldwide distribution) when he proclaimed it ``the most ferociously original horror film of the year.''

Since then, Raimi has proven he is capable of doing a lot more than jolting his audiences with spectacularly gory visions of the undead, directing adaptations of bestselling novels (A Simple Plan), a western featuring the unlikely quartet of Sharon Stone, Leonardo DiCaprio, Gene Hackman and Russell Crowe (The Quick and the Dead), an ode to his beloved baseball starring Kevin Costner (For Love of the Game), and, of course, a trilogy of Spider-Man films that have earned more than $2.5 billion worldwide.

So what could possibly have prompted the A-list filmmaker to go back to that lowliest of movie genres for another exercise in wild-and-woolly horror?

''Making the Spider-Man movies is wonderful, but it's also exhausting,'' Raimi, 49, says from his production office in Los Angeles. ``You have so many departments to deal with -- so many special effects that go into one shot. I just felt like getting back to the basics and entertaining the audience with a lot less, without all the great equipment and toys the Spider-Man movies afford me.''

Obviously made on a relatively small budget (at least by Hollywood standards), Drag Me to Hell stars Alison Lohman as Christine, a bank loan official who is forced by her boss to evict an old woman (Lorna Raver) from her house. But the crone doesn't take kindly to getting kicked out. First she tries to kill Christine in a long, ferocious fight that takes place entirely inside a car and is reminiscent of Bruce Campbell's standoffs with the zombies in The Evil Dead. When that fails, the hag puts a curse on Christine, dooming her to a visit from a demon that will show up in three days to do exactly what the film's title promises.

A riotous, frantic entertainment best enjoyed in a crowded theater, Drag Me to Hell was written by Raimi and his frequent collaborator brother Ivan using many of the tricks they learned in their old horror days.

''It's like playing a chess game with the audience, trying to anticipate what they're expecting and then giving them something else,'' Raimi says. ``They think they're going to get a scare when she opens that door at the end of a long hallway, so I'm going to give them a joke instead. The idea is not simply to fool them but to scare them and make them laugh.''

JOLTS FOR THE JADED

And scare you Raimi does. Drag Me to Hell goes so outrageously over the top with its vision of otherworldly demons, spirits and malevolent goats that at times you can't believe what you're seeing. It also offers what precious few scary movies can manage anymore: Countless jolts guaranteed to send jaded, seen-it-all audiences jumping from their seats.

What's more, Raimi pulls off his scares within the confines of a PG-13 rating, something horror fans often interpret as a badge of cowardice on the part of the filmmakers, whom they suspect of selling out in order to snare a wider audience.

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