ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Season 1 of the Starz network series Ash vs Evil Dead. It examines the term nostalgia-horror, television that resurrects popular and cult horror film narratives and characters from the golden age of postclassical horror and takes them beyond the fan fiction of the Internet. The series is built around Campbell's character Ash, who is the only actor to return in a key role. This is unsurprising considering the slaughter of the other main actors in the Evil Dead films who were dismembered and buried in and around the cabin. The dark mythology that surrounds the Evil Dead—with its isolated cabin, its portal to hell, and the summoning of terrifying demons—has emerged partly as a result of this independent low-budget horror being so raw and edgy. Campbell describes Ash in The Evil Dead as a "whimpering moron" and says that in Evil Dead II, he progressed the character into "more of a movie hero".
