Horror Chase

On show in the Rotterdamse Schouwburg Foyer Horror Chase is not film but it is cinema. The work by visual artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy can best be classified as `media art'. They use computers and Internet to make work that is about the media; often dry, morphological stock-takings of popular genres. With Horror Chase, the sensuality of film also acquires a powerful role in their work. The project is based on a scene from the comic horror film Evil Dead 2 (1987) by Sam Raimi. It is one of the few realistic scenes in this classic cult film that has never been screened at the IFFR. The protagonist, Ash, is pursued by demons who remain offscreen (probably because they themselves are wielding the SteadyCam). Ash stumbles and flees from the salon via the broom cupboard and kitchen to the shed and back, while he turns and looks at the camera pursuing him, almost dying of fear. The McCoys have rerecorded this scene in the form of a loop. You could project this loop endlessly as a predictable emblem of an archetypal terror pursuit. Horror Chase is however not an ordinary loop. The scene is repeatedly recut by computer hardware built into a simple suitcase. The suitcase produces an endless variety of gruesome panic, that develops a fascinating beauty and also comments on the human condition. Willem Velthoven, Mediamatic