You could describe In a Violent Nature in many ways. It’s like a modern reboot of Friday the 13th that tells the majority of the story from Jason Voorhees’s point of view. In spurts, it’s like Terrifier 2 for A24 nerds. It is, perhaps, an anti-slasher post-horror anti-post-horror slasher. It is like a parody of the slasher film inside a parody of so-called “elevated horror.”
In the woods of Ontario, a group of young people on holiday stumble upon an abandoned fire tower. One of them picks up a curious locket and takes it with him. This locket, like a mythic totem, was the only thing allowing an undead killer named Johnny to rest peacefully in the ground. Given to him by his mother, the locket means a lot to Johnny (presumably; Johnny never speaks). The balance disturbed, Johnny is unearthed and begins stalking the woods in search of this family heirloom.
Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature employs the conventions of post-horror as a deadpan delivery mechanism for 1980s-style slasher schlock. Moments of brutality in this film feel like a big joke on the horror genre itself – save for the fact that most of it is not played for laughs and the bits that are aren’t all that funny. The film’s plodding, mute masked killer is at one point likened to a sick animal who cannot help but continue to do violence. Some animals just have it in their bones to kill and keep killing. It’s in their nature. This comes off like a nod toward the horror genre itself – it is in our nature to watch films that depict pain. We desire to stare off into the tree line, delightfully afraid of what might spring forth from the undergrowth.
But this oblique reference to the genre and why it perseveres – as well as the film itself – misses the many other things that horror can provide. In meditating on the slasher framework, In a Violent Nature forgets to be a desirable horror film in its own right.
In a Violent Nature attempts to deconstruct the 80s slasher using contemporary stylistic trends in horror filmmaking – 4:3 aspect ratio, slow tracking shots, a lugubrious pace, etc. Nash and the effects team add some sauce to the art-house horror stew – practical effects look lovingly cheap and sloppily gory – but the whole exercise can’t help but feel sterile and distant. To take the vantage of the Jason Voorhees adjacent stalker killer (not his POV, but his perspective on events) means that there is little room for anything but a meditation on genre and media depictions of violence. It is horror – violence is in its nature, literally in the soil. Beyond telling us this thing which we already know and presenting a few gnarly deaths, the film has little to bring to the slasher table.
The film indulges in the stock teen characters familiar to franchises like Friday the 13th, but it goes a step further by giving its cadre of young victims almost no meaningful dialogue. They are not just character archetypes, they are hollow fodder. So while the film looks glossy like a shiny new Ari Aster or Jordan Peele project, it is also rotten at its core.
To be clear, I believe this to be the point. And it is almost unfair to count this against the film. The film wades in the shallow waters of the slasher formula, while also mining that formula’s penchant for buckets of gore (to be fair, there are less instances of grisly violence than the title suggests). Giving characters dimension or the backstory of the killer more complexity would defeat the purpose of the exercise.
Still, Nash fails to thread the needle when this story does go for something meaningful and thematic. The film’s long final scene – aside from being dreadfully shot with odd, queasy angles inside of a car – presents a long-winded monologue about violence as the film finally pivots away from Johnny and toward the “Final Girl.” None of it really works. It’s such a strange note to end the film on.
I was initially rapt by the presentation of In a Violent Nature. The simple re-alignment of POV, in which the audience is often positioned one step behind the killer, staring at the back of his head as he clomps slowly through the woods, is effective. And if you go in knowing that this film is not here to scare you, you may lock into the meditative movement of it all. As a genre exercise, though, I think the film misses the mark.
In a Violent Nature: B-
As always, thanks for reading!
—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)
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