Today is the birthday of the amazingly charismatic Bruce Campbell. An icon from 1980s horror cinema, Campbell’s career has been prolific (in addition to tv’s Burn Notice he’s been featured in almost all of Sam Raimi’s films) but he’s firmly cemented in the horror lexicon as ‘Ash’ from the incredibly funny, scary, and entertaining Evil Dead series.

While filmic montage is prevalent amongst those contemporary artists appropriating horror movies, New York based couple and artistic collaborators Jennifer and Kevin McCoy utilize and approach Rami’s Evil Dead 2 (1987) in a very performative way. Inspired by the film that was itself a literal re-make of Evil Dead(1981) – including the same director, plot, and main actor only with a bigger budget – the McCoys’ Horror Chase (2002) is a live computer driven video installation where a series of digitized chase sequences from the film are re-edited and re-presented in real time via the electronics housed in the black suitcase.

Despite the technological inclusion, the work has a tangible architectural and structural element to it as the depicted chase scenes have been laboriously re-constructed by the artists. Replication takes place is many forms. There is the re-made interior of the quintessential ‘cabin in the woods’ in Evil Dead 2 with Kevin McCoy actor Adrian LaTourelle re-enacting Bruce Campbell’s part, the obvious mimic of the movie’s scene/implicit narrative, and then the various random looping supplied by the computers. Of course this re-appropriation is interesting in relation to Evil Dead 2 being a recycled/updated version of the campy original making apparent that Horror Chase uses, re-affirms, and re-projects that compartmentalization in the horror genre by highlighting some of its tropes.

Horror Chase: production design by Roshelle Berliner and shot by Michael McDonough

You can watch Horror Chase online here.