Evil Dead Rise and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret are kinda the same movie
It isn’t unusual to see new movies catering to nostalgia for ’80s and ’90s kids — the current cycle of reboots and spinoffs mostly seems to be aimed at that specific audience, sometimes blurring the lines between legacy sequel and regular sequel. Two current movies throw back a little further, though, reviving releases that will be most familiar to people born in the 1960s and 1970s. Evil Dead Rise celebrates the 40th anniversary of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movies (and, for that matter, the 10th anniversary of the most recent remake) by revisiting the discomfiting gross-out menace of Raimi’s 1983 original, while Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret adapts the classic 1970 Judy Blume coming-of-age novel by preserving its period setting (and frankness about periods).
These two films are vastly different in style and subject matter, but they share some unexpected common ground: They both update and tweak their source material by adding in the complications of parenthood. In doing so, they both get at some valuable, uncomfortable truths.
On the surface, Margaret seems like a faithful adaptation. It doesn’t update the adventures of NYC-to-Jersey transplant tween Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) from the early 1970s to 2023, or impose a stronger master plot on the story’s episodic structure. Fans will recognize most of those episodes from the beloved book: jealousy over a friend’s first menstruation; rumor-mongering about a classmate who is ahead of the rest in physical development; Margaret exploring different religious options while talking to a vaguely conceived God. But anyone who read the book during childhood will notice one substantial divergence from Blume’s writing.
Blume’s novel is written in first person, which means
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