When I introduce genre and tropes to a class, I usually ask them to describe to me what happens in the most generic slasher film. 9 times out of 10, the students repeat a version of exactly the same thing: a group of teenagers, a house that just might be a cabin in the woods, a masked, vaguely-supernatural killer who brutally murders the young people one by one until only one girl remains. Really, I don’t even know why I bothered spelling that out.
On paper, In a Violent Nature is – 100% – this exact textbook slasher with two immediate differences: 1. the young people aren’t teenagers, 2. the film has zero interest in using them as the empathetic lens. Here, we almost always stick with the perspective of the killer, the camera following just behind him as he stalks slowly through bucolic landscapes; lush fields, otherwise peaceful woods full of chirping birds, the sun is up, the bees buzz, the water sparkles. This is his habitat, his hunting ground. Our undead, cursed killer’s name is Johnny (Ry Barrett) – though the story attached to him barely matters. All you really need to know is a dumbass hiker snatched the object keeping his soul at rest and now, naturally, he’ll kill until it’s retrieved. Maybe beyond that.
The film is a progression of brutal, occasionally quite original kills (the “yoga kill” earned the highest acclaim of mixed vocal reactions and laughter in my screening). We follow Johnny lurching ever-forward until the cuts where we don’t, and throughout the dialogue is largely overheard. He stalks, he stands at a distance, we hear the collection of cabin-dwellers tell ghost stories in a fashion that mimics a first-person video game’s dance between cut-scenes. Everything we learn we learn through these fragments, and in the meantime we pass through long periods of silence, the soundtrack little more than the crunch of leaves, the sound of a breeze through the trees, birds and bugs.
This is what’s fucked up about In a Violent Nature, and what makes it curiously memorable against a field where its plot beats are absolutely nothing new: it’s kind of beautiful, strangely tranquil in the moments without a merciless dismemberment. A friend described it as “slasher movie ASMR” and I think that’s mostly right. For freaks like me who already find a specific kind of comfort in the contained awfulness of horror films, director Chris Nash has created something even-keeled in its mania, at times really just oddly soothing. It’s a little bit like someone spliced up a Terrence Malick movie, a little like Nash was challenged to mash-up the already slow-start most slasher films have with art house slow cinema. And this is the other thing I always wind up teaching students about genre: if you understand it, you know sometimes it doesn’t take much of a tweak to make something capable of building on an existing formula. In a Violent Nature gets what absolute garbage like Terrifier (don’t get me started) doesn’t; genre success isn’t just a question of continued escalation of the bells and whistles of on-screen sadism and ugly art direction, sometimes it’s just about the creep of pure juxtaposition.
In a Violent Nature isn’t a movie full of jump scares and cheap editing. Instead, it’s a slasher that unsettles exactly because so much of it happens in plain day, in a place we look at and find so peaceful. And yet, this is a wild place, a place of constant violence, a place where human beings are nearly invasive. Slowly, In a Violent Nature makes good on a line I’ll always remember uttered in Antichrist, “nature is Satan’s church”, a place untamed and ruled by creatures ruled by id and instinct. Johnny kills like a senseless, diseased animal and with as much power and lumbering prowess. By the film’s final shot, its quiet strength is very, very clear. We’re shown a beautiful landscape. Nothing is there, absolutely nothing but the brush and the sky, and yet all we can see, all we expect is death.
love + squalor 