Celebrate Vault’s THE NASTY trade paperback release with the first issue

Calling all scary movie fans!

Scotland, 1994. Eighteen-year-old Thumper Connell still has an imaginary friend: the masked killer from his favourite slasher film. Thumper is obsessed with horror and always has been. He fills his time with scary VHS rentals and hanging out with his fellow fans, The Murder Club. But everything changes when his local video shop acquires one of the notorious films known as “video nasties” – films so scary, they’re banned and burned. It’s only a movie, though, right? It’s all just imaginary, isn’t it?

A story about the perception of evil, the power of genre, the love of fandom, the need to create art… oh, and crap-your-pants TERROR!

Do you like scary movies? I do.

Anyone who knows me, or is familiar with my writing, will likely have a fair idea that horror is one of my great loves and obsessions. It has been for as long as I can remember. And some of the earliest lessons in my horror education came from my local video shop. This wasn’t a Blockbuster or a Global Video. It was a little local independent business, located on the street
where I lived as a little kid, a 5-minute walk from my house.

That place is long gone now, so I’m hopefully not getting anyone in trouble here, but I will say that this video shop was… permissive in what it let young me rent out. I’d walk along to the video shop, and come home with copies of Peter Pan and Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence. Child’s Play 2. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Halloween 4: The Return of
Michael Myers. House. The Puppet Master. Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight. The Monster Squad, which my cousin hired out on loop so constantly that the shop eventually sold him their copy since no one else was getting a chance to hire it out anyway.

There are so many films that I remember fondly to this day due to that early exposure on videotape, paired with a supportive home environment that encouraged the blooming of my imagination, no matter how weird or morbid the direction it may have been taking, while also assuring me that it was all make-believe and movie magic. It’s likely because of these fond memories that horror, for me, isn’t necessarily something dark or scary. It’s my comfort food, my safe place, associated with feelings of warm nostalgia and happy memories of a childhood spent sitting in front of the TV in the dark, scaring myself silly.

I’m going to make myself sound like an old fart now, but it makes me sad that video shops are gone. There is a lot of ways in which the world of the 2020s really isn’t all that different from the world of the 1990s, but kids of today just have no experience of something that was such a ubiquitous part of the pop culture landscape and which played such a formative role for me.
There must have been barely a week that went by in my pre-teen years where I wasn’t visiting that video shop. It was a library of films, both mainstream and obscure, brought almost to my doorstep. Before home streaming, before the Internet, this was the pipeline connecting a kid in Scotland to the wider world of movies, and to the wider world of horror.

With The Nasty, I want us to open up a portal into that lost world. A time when you could walk into a shop on Main Street and be greeted with a shelf packed with films you’d never heard of, with no Letterboxd or Rotten Tomatoes to tell you if they were good, nothing to go by but what
video cover caught your eye the most. And also, a time when horror could still be mysterious and forbidden, when, in the UK, there were banned films you couldn’t get at your local video shop, whose reputation would grow through hushed word of mouth in their absence. The video nasties.

I’m so excited to be working with Vault Comics to be bringing this story to life. In a relatively short time, this publisher has deservedly established a reputation for quality comics storytelling, and it is an honour to join the prestigious ensemble of talent who have worked under this umbrella. And I am especially pleased to be working with George Kambadais, an artist who I have admired for years, and who has brought a charm and vibrancy to this world that makes it thrive.

The Nasty is my love letter to horror, and to embracing your passion in life, whatever it may be. You might find it a little bit funny, a little bit scary, but I hope that, most of all, that love with which this story was crafted shines through.

The Nasty is a horror story, not just in terms of it featuring a hulking masked slasher and a cursed videotape, but in that it’s a story about horror, about what it means to us and the impact it has on us. Horror, for me, isn’t necessarily something dark or scary. It’s my comfort food, my safe
place, associated with feelings of warm nostalgia and happy memories of a childhood spent sitting in front of the TV in the dark, scaring myself silly. And a lot of why I have such fond recollections is because of my local video shop, where as a kid I accessed a treasure trove of films, both mainstream and obscure. It makes me sad that this video shop and just about all like it
are long gone, a memory of a bygone era. With The Nasty, I want us to open up a portal into that lost world.