In a Violent Nature: an artfully gruesome take on slasher movie tropes

Writer-director Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature is deliberately thin in synopsis. It offers barely a sketch of a story as it presents a fresh take on a form – the slasher movie sequel – often dismissed as ‘just a bunch of random kill scenes’. The obvious model for hulking thug Johnny is Jason Voorhees, the mute machete killer who trudges through Friday the 13th sequels, but Nash also evokes low-rent Friday knock-offs like Madman (1981) and shot-in-Canada variations such as My Bloody Valentine (1981). Like Jason, Johnny is a vengeance-seeking disfigured psychopath with a tragic backstory, and an unkillable walking dead thing who suffers ‘henhouse syndrome’, an urge to murder everything within reach. Johnny’s smoke mask – supposedly vintage firefighter gear – is his equivalent of Jason’s hockey mask or the miner’s helmet and faceplate of My Bloody Valentine, while his wood-axe and logger’s hook have the iconic heft of Michael Myers’ knife in the Halloween films or Leatherface’s saw in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise.

Nash trusts audiences to pick up on details (the campfire tale origin story and we-meet-again moments which establish that Johnny has been on a kill-rampage several times before) that locate the film in its subgenre – a later entry in a series of which it is actually the first and only instalment. But this isn’t a knowing metafiction on the Scream model, intent on simultaneously celebrating and lampooning a much-despised form. Instead, In a Violent Nature is a slasher film the way A Ghost Story (2017) is a ghost story, taking seriously the most basic, shopworn motifs to prompt a different type of audience engagement with its familiar tale. 

Photographed in Academy ratio by Pierce Derks and with an extraordinary soundscape engineered by Michelle Hwu and Tim Atkins, the film doesn’t use subjective camera to give a killer’s point of view, as deployed by John Carpenter in Halloween (1978), where the device gave Michael a semi-supernatural presence, and by Sean S. Cunningham in Friday the 13th (1980), where it concealed the identity of a mystery murderer. The film’s POV is objective, but almost always with Johnny – generally a few feet behind the back of his head but sometimes hanging back much further so the horrors are almost lost in still lifes of farmhouses, lakes and woods. Typical slasher movie characters appear, but in fragments or from afar: we get their measure from overheard snatches of dialogue. Kris (Andrea Pavlovic) is ‘final girl’, courted by Troy (Liam Leone), her unsympathetic boyfriend, and Colt (Cameron Love), the sensitive outsider. In slasher terms, Troy deserves to die but Colt (tragically killed while enabling the girl to escape) doesn’t – both are overkilled, heads reduced to abstracts by bludgeoning.

A debate about the slasher movies of the 1970s and 80s was whether subjective camera – combined with obnoxious characters who audiences liked to see killed in imaginative ways – encouraged sadistic identification with the murderer. Here, though we’re ‘with’ Johnny, we’re never inside him. The nearest thing to an insight into his thinking is the henhouse comment made by the woman (Lauren-Marie Taylor) who picks up the injured Kris on the road (the sequence is a tease for viewers who remember characters like this either turning out to be complicit with the crimes or becoming incidental extra victims). The camera that looks everywhere in the woods and only incidentally catches any gory action almost suggests a horror movie on the pattern of Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) or La Région centrale (1971), where human presences and storylines are incidental to whatever happens to be in the frame at any given time – though this takes care to function as a straight slasher picture as much as an arty deconstruction.

It’s also curiously compelling; the film’s signature effect is Johnny’s heavy tread, which sets a heartbeat pace, at once ominous and almost soothing as the killer tramps down woodland paths in pursuit of the unwary and the doomed. Even gruesome practical effects – a yoga girl doing ‘stretches’ has her head pulled out through her backbone, an infernally loud log-splitting machine is used as a guillotine – are presented without shock cuts or jump scares, as things which happen in (violent) nature rather than outrages against a moral universe.

 ► In a Violent Nature is in UK cinemas from 12 July.