Review: In a Violent Nature

Chris Nash reimagines the slasher

The knock against many slasher films is that, with their cardboard main characters – who are often just monster bait – it’s the villain who is the true star. Aside from a franchise like Scream, in which the lead ensemble tends to return and the face behind the mask changes, the slashers are the heroes. We don’t go into Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street to root on the teenagers; we go to watch as a masked (or gloved) killer punishes them for their vapidity and stupidity. 

So it was probably only a matter of time before someone made a slasher completely from the villain’s point of view. That’s the premise of Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature, hitting theaters this weekend. And if you’ve ever wondered what Jason Voorhees was doing in between kills, the answer is: a lot of walking. 

In a Violent Nature opens with a shot of the woods; offscreen, we hear teenagers talking. They take a necklace they find on the ground. Shortly after, a body bubbles up from the mud and tromps off into the forest. This is Johnny, a deformed lumberjack. The film follows him as he saunters through the wilderness in search of his necklace, occasionally encountering unwitting victims whom he violently slaughters. 

The concept is intriguing. Rather than waste 90 minutes of time with paper-thin, unlikable characters, Nash keeps the camera trained on Johnny as he stalks through the woods, occasionally stops to collect an old firefighters’ mask – which, regrettably, makes him look like a rusted-out Minion – or a weapon, and then wanders into a typical slasher plot, of which we gain minor bits of exposition as Johnny listens in. The camera work is steady and slow, taking in often gorgeous shots of the forest. But the story told in the background is typical slasher fodder – dumb kids making dumb decisions; at one point, we learn this isn’t the first time this has happened. The juxtaposition between deliberate staging and brutal kills is unnerving; it’s Gus Van Sant’s Friday the 13th Part 2. The matter-of-factness of the murders feels more disturbing than the composed chase sequences in a traditional slasher, and by attaching the audiences’ viewpoints to Johnny’s, it makes them complicit. Slasher movies are guilty pleasures to be laughed at with friends; In a Violent Nature sticks around longer than I expected because it refuses to let you off the hook with a gag or to distance you from the killer.  

This is Nash’s first feature, and it’s a heck of a calling card. The lack of a soundtrack and a steady camera make Johnny’s stalks through the woods oddly hypnotic and tense. And while I become less enamored with elaborate gore the older I get, I have to admit that the kill sequences are brutal and effective, and created largely with practical effects. Two kills in particular stuck with me long after the movie finished. One in which — there’s no gentle way to put this – Johnny turns a victim into a human pretzel is a gnarly feat that must have been hell to film. And a prolonged sequence in which the camera stays locked on a victim who silently lies there as Johnny makes use of a gas-powered wood chopper is haunting and terrifying, not the least for the fact that the character is alive as the scene plays out, not speaking but quietly blinking their eyes. It’s a horrific, disturbing scene. 

And yet, I admire the craft of In a Violent Nature more than I like the movie itself. Part of that is because Nash can’t seem to sustain his own gimmick for long stretches. Shortly after the film has gotten going, Johnny stumbles onto the young victims telling a story from a campfire. Rather than shoot the sequence from Johnny’s POV as he listens in, Nash cheats and shifts perspective, staging the scene like any other expository moment from a traditional slasher. It’s deflating to seem him break his rules so early in the film. And the movie’s climax does it again, shifting the story from Johnny’s point of view to a more typical “final girl” chase that ends with a lengthy dialogue sequence that makes sense in its thematic approach but whose execution is torpid and ends the movie on a shrug . 

Also, while In a Violent Nature feels more meditative and thoughtful than a typical slasher, it’s really not. Johnny’s no more of a character than Jason Voorhees or post-Halloween Michael Myers. He’s just a low-IQ killing machine, and watching him walk through the woods has little more power than watching a video game avatar do the same. Disposable and interchangeable as slasher might be, there’s a primal pull in watching their young characters reckon with their mortality; the appeal of Scream – the gold standard of modern slashers – is in rooting for its characters to survive the night. In a Violent Nature is rooted in a character with no desire or motive other than to kill and get back his trinket, and his victims never steal the spotlight from Johnny in the way Jason or Freddy did from theirs. 

Maybe it’s just age showing. The older I get, the more I want horror that works because it makes me confront deeper fears and the less I care about nameless vapid kids being dismembered by masked weirdos for my amusement and laughs. I think Nash will have an interesting career ahead of him – he’s a consummate craftsman – and I appreciate the effort. But at the end of the day, maybe there’s just not much meaning to be mined from a mad slasher.