Director/Screenplay – Chris Nash, Producers – Shannon Hanmer & Peter Kuplowsky, Photography – Pierce Derks, Visual Effects – Wild FX (Supervisor – Jeff Bruneel), Special Effects Supervisor – Michael W. Hamilton, Makeup Effects – Steven Kostanski. Production Company – Zygote Pictures/Shudder/Low Sky Productions.
Cast
Ry Barrett (Johnny), Andrea Pavlovic (Kris), Lauren Taylor (The Woman), Charlotte Creaghan (Aurora), Cameron Love (Colt), Lea Rose Sebastianis (Brodie), Reece Presley (The Ranger), Liam Leone (Troy), Sam Roulston (Ehren), Alexander Oliver (Evan), Timothy Paul McCarthy (Chuck)
Plot
A group of friends pick up a locket they find near an old fire tower in the woods. This causes the corpse of Johnny to rise from the dead. Around the campfire, the friends tell the story of how Johnny was a handicapped boy who was tricked by locals into climbing the tower to find a bag of toys only to fall to his death. The legend goes that on the anniversary of that death Johnny’s spirit rises from the dead to seek vengeance. Johnny now stumbles through the woods, brutally killing all he comes across.
In a Violent Nature was a feature-length directorial debut for Canadian director Chris Nash. Nash had previously worked in special effects, made some short films and then directed the Z is for Zygote episode of ABCS of Death 2 (2014).
In a Violent Nature could almost be called an arthouse slasher film. It takes the essential tropes of the Slasher Film, where it is heavily reliant on the basics of Friday the 13th (1980) and sequels – the deformed child cruelly treated who is killed during a prank gone wrong, is resurrected from the dead, puts on a mask and proceeds to stalk teens through the woods as they party and get up to hijinks before brutally slaughtering them. However, everything about In a Violent Nature is different – from its non-commercial pacing and storytelling and its unique use of the camera.
Chris Nash’s camera takes a unique almost second-person perspective – where the camera tracks a few paces behind the figure of Johnny as we follow him through the woods. It is a highly original spin on the slasher film where the perspective is shifted to the hulking maniac – not in terms of first-person camera but where they remain central to the frame but we never see their face. The film stays like this most of the ruuning time. The only significant time that Nash breaks away to switch point-of-view is right at the end as Andrea Pavlovic becomes the equivalent of Marilyn Burns making a getaway at the end of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) – although here her escape is far more ambiguous – but that is it.
Ry Barrett as JohnnyA unique second person perspective with the camera following the killer
The second-person viewpoint is alternated with wide and medium angles where the players – the usual teen victims in a slasher film – are seen at a distance. They are indistinct, mere sketches of characters, even though we identify with the tropes they represent. It is as though we are not involved with what is happening – attacks take place with the camera in super-wide perspective on the jetty in the lake where a yelp is all we hear as one girl disappears. Other times the camera will come into closeup to show the slaughter of victims in gore-drenched detail, but rarely lets us see anything of their faces or gives the characters any individuation.
The gore scenes come with a savage brutality. In one of the most outrageous scenes, a hook is impaled through Charlotte Creaghan’s stomach and then through her neck as her head and spine is bent down to be wrenched through the hole in the stomach. Elsewhere, we see a body methodically cut into piece in a log splitter. A guy’s head is splattered with a machete in great gouts of blood – while Chris Nash’s camera is focused on the girl running away, in the background we hear the repeated crunching as Johnny hacks at the dead guy’s body that just keeps on going and going. The effects for these scenes come from Steven Kostanski, a fine director in his own right with Manborg (2011) and The Void (2016).
In a Violent Nature premiered at Sundance and played a number of other festivals, before being sold to the Shudder network. Chris Nash has announced a sequel.
