Departmental film night: introducing EVIL DEAD (2013)

Last month, some colleagues and I established a monthly film night for the staff and students in the Department of Social Sciences at Northumbria. Last night we screened Evil Dead (2013): Fede Alvarez's excellent remake of Sam Raimi's original from 1981.

I introduced the film, situating it within the long cultural aftermath of the British "video nasties" panic and in relation to notions of cultural "recycling" in the wake of Donald Trump's regressive "Make American Great Again" nonsense. The Evil Dead remake, I contended, can be thought of as a particularly progressive form of a cultural recycling, in that, by being a more "extreme" version of a previously banned film, it illustrates how futile state censorship ultimately proves to be. 

Images courtesy Shaan Mahmud