Final Rating: 3/5
The Slasher as it’s commonly understood is only about 50 years old. No longer considered a novelty, the notoriously formulaic subgenre should be played out by now. Borne from fears of serial killers running rampant in the 60s and 70s, slashers have evolved and adapted with the times. When the original formula modeled on Halloween (1978) became old hat, they folded back in on themselves. In the 90s, they became self-aware. Scream (1996) openly discusses the rules of the Slasher, and in 2000, it found itself, along with the rest of its cohort, parodied in Scary Movie.
By the 2000s and 2010s, meta commentary took it a step further with movies like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010), and The Cabin in the Woods (2011). Despite these plays at superficial self-loathing, the genre remained. Any attempt to refute the Slasher only creates a new one. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2008), You’re Next (2013), and Happy Death Day (2017) all aim to subvert the genre in their own way; however, they still carry on the title of Slasher, effectively refashioning it for the brave new world.
It is no surprise that the 2020s have ushered in a new wave of slashers, genre-bent and revisionist. Ti West’s X trilogy, Freaky (2020), Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), and the legacy sequels of Scream and Halloween, all reexamine and reappropriate elements of their predecessors to create something that feels distinctly modern and relatively original. Writer and director Chris Nash takes a fresh approach to the genre with his slow cinema slasher, In a Violent Nature.
The film follows Johnny (Ry Barrett), a masked killer reminiscent of Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), who carries a drag hook reminiscent of I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) rather than Jason’s signature machete. Rather than facing him head on, the audience is stationed behind him, with following shots of the killer making up a majority of the runtime.
Johnny spends several long sequences trudging through the woods to take revenge on a group of 20-somethings who stole a necklace from his unmarked grave earlier that day. Blissfully unaware of the danger closing in on them, they spend their weekend at a secluded cabin in that way young people do in horror movies: they drink, they smoke, they make passes at one another, and, inevitably, they wander off on their own, only to find Johnny waiting, ready to strike.
It is apparent while watching In a Violent Nature that plot, characterization, and acting are not priorities for Nash, merely clichés he is gesturing to. The boilerplate B-movie Nash implies acts merely as the setting, something vaguely recognizable to the audience for Nash to use as shorthand. Midway through the movie, Johnny is revealed to be the recurring killer of a franchise. He is not new to the framing film’s imagined audience, nor is he unfamiliar to us as an archetype.
What In a Violent Nature has to offer its slasher-literate audience is a shifted perspective. Instead of following the hapless victims, we spend our time walking alongside the killer, watching things unfold from a detached angle. Nash himself has compared the style to that of a nature documentary. The slasher genre so fond of its “cheap tricks,” like jump scares, is somewhat defanged in this iteration, but rest assured, Nash still indulges in quite a bit of gore, even staging a new “Top 10 Most Brutal Kills” list candidate about half-way through.
The strongest moments are the ones most committed to the film’s premise. It’s been described as a slow movie, one laden with long shots of Johnny marching his way through the forest towards his prey. In actuality, these sequences have quite a few cuts, which are logically needed to pass time and distance; nonetheless, they tend to break the trance for the viewer. When Nash keeps things minimal and lets the action play out without editorial interference, In a Violent Nature really shines.
One standout moment shows a young woman swimming alone in the lake as we watch Johnny slowly stalk towards her from the opposite shore into the water. For a few moments, the audience is left patiently waiting. A static shot of the lake and the dock she jumped from holds steady as she is suddenly pulled under. The camera doesn’t react; there is no music cue, no frantic underwater view of the struggle, just one more cry for help as she surfaces before being dragged down for the last time. In this scene, the film is perfect. Its purpose is clear and well-executed, and for a moment, despite the familiarity of it all, everything old is new again. Unfortunately, it is inconsistent, and there aren’t enough of these moments to make a truly brilliant film.
In a Violent Nature does not go as far as forgoing the requisite Final Girl to root for in the end. It would be hard to characterize the Final Girl, Kris (Andrea Pavlovic), beyond what can be assumed about her based on her role. The final moments of the movie turn from Johnny’s perspective to hers, giving us a brief glimpse of her. Normally, this swap happens almost immediately in a slasher. We get one or two scenes from the killer’s perspective before taking on hers for the majority of the movie. Here the formula is inverted, their positions switched. The time we spend with her reveals a young woman in a moment of transformation. We are witnessing her inevitable rebirth as the Final Girl, the person she was written to become.
One of the strongest moments of the film is a monologue delivered by Lauren-Marie Taylor, a scream queen who starred in Friday the 13th Part 2, though she didn’t make it out of that one alive. Even the presence of Taylor is a bit subversive; Final Girls get all the cameos these days. The story told by Taylor is open for interpretation, however I read it as a thoughtful, though not pretentious, meditation on horror stories, their villains, and their heroes.
It is a grounding moment as we come back to the rest of humanity alongside Kris, preparing to reenter society. The monologue itself, however well-written and performed, could have bookended almost any recent horror film and been effective. It doesn’t feel out of place, but it does emphasize the unevenness of the film. Things are tied up neatly, if not necessarily in a bow.
Throughout the film, there is a sense of compromise, and it is hard to ignore the potential of a more stubborn version of this film. Striking moments of austerity, like the scene at the lake, show what the film could have been if it had maintained the sterile distance Nash referred to as documentarian. A strict approach may have opened the film up to more surface-level criticism. Surely, it would have been less watchable, but it would have made more of an impression.
What could have been a radical, incisive film feels watered down to something aiming for broader appeal. In a Violent Nature is worth a watch for avid fans of the Slasher genre, but offers something ultimately unsatisfying. Maybe a sequel or three is just what they need to get their proper footing.
