Animals don’t get too hung up on reason… they just keep killing…’
The slasher genre has evolved from proto-slashers like Peeping Tom and Psycho through the Italian Giallo movies of the 70s to Black Christmas and Halloween and the 80s slasher boom and then on to Scream subverting the genre in the ’90s. Once a genre has slipped into self-parody that normally signals the beginning of the end of invention. While the traditional slasher has all but died out in recent years – replaced by (ugh) “elevated horror” – the appetite for the humble slasher movie is still very much out there. In a Violent Nature, against all odds, is that rarest of beasts, a genuinely original slasher…
The pitch is so simple that it’s astonishing that it has never been done before—a slasher movie but from the POV of the killer. The plot is deliberately derivative. It’s essentially Friday the 13th. A long-dead, supernatural killing machine is awakened when somebody finds a locket in the woods. What transpires next is typical slasher fare that is given a whole new lease of life due to a simple change of POV.
We follow Johnny, the killer, as played by Ry Barrett, as he stalks his victims through the woods. We see various victims dispatched in a variety of ingenious ways but it is the shots of the killer silently and methodically striding through the woodland that really sets Chris Nash’s movie apart from the crowd. These long tracking shots combined with various static shots in which Johnny is stood somewhere in the background are just as menacing as the death sequences and it is in those moments that In a Violent Nature truly soars.
While I’m not sure how much rewatch value this movie has, it is incredibly refreshing to encounter a truly original slasher movie. The genre lives on. Or rather it shambles on. Through the woods. At night.
