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But what about the slasher’s perspective? It’s a question that is usually pondered when slasher films start to lose their allure. As the victims grow less appealing, the killer lurking in the woods becomes more fascinating. In A Violent Nature explores this concept and doesn’t try to polish the behind-the-scenes activities of the killer when not hacking and slashing.
The killer of this refreshing horror take is Johnny (Ry Barrett), a disfigured man concealed in an old firefighter mask. He stalks the woods looking for his lost locket, an important part of his past that the film gives us glimpses of in flashes of memory. As he prowls, he slowly kills his way back to his acquistion, his history being revealed by the victims he targets.
For most of the movie, however, Johnny remains as mute as an animal being filmed for a documentary. There are several shots where Johnny is doing little more than slowly walking through the woods, occassionally stopping to observe a dead fox in a trap or eavesdrop on campers around a campfire. It adheres to a similar filmmaking style that Gus Van Sant used for Elephant, where a school shooting is grounded with so much realism it becomes so eerily mundane.
But when Johnny kills, holy shit, does he kill! He delivers such masterful slaughters as cutting off half of a head with an old drawknife. The centerpiece is a gory delight of him using a hook and chain on an unfortunate woman, shoving the hook through her body, latching it onto her head, and pulling her head through her entire torso. Every attempt to kill Johnny fails, where he rises from the dead after a few seconds of being wounded by an attack. All he needs is some brief recovery before he goes back to smashing in faces with rocks.
Director Chris Nash is fairly open with this style of filmmaking that it never bores much by never settling on the format. There are several long shots of Johnny’s march where there’s nothing happen. A kill made underwater at the beach is only observed from the shore, never showing the money shots as Johnny drowns a girl and casually walks back to the shore. But then, with the aforementioned head-through-torso bit, there are plenty of close ups to show all the gory details. This change in style makes it feel like we’re getting several perpsectives rather than the over-the-shoulder perspective akin to playing as the killer in Dead By Daylight. This makes Johnny’s clever choices in routes and distractions compelling. While the victims don’t see him coming and the audience might remark “how’d he get there,” this film showcases all the tactics we don’t see in the darkness of the forest or behind the corners of a cabin.
The gory courage of In A Violent Nature makes it such an intoxicating horror. It’s as much a subversion of the usual horror perspectives and staging while still trying to have its slasher moments worth savoring. There is a story present for Johnny where a film shot from the standard victim perspective could still be a good film. But when we get to see the killer exclusively, even in his boring moments of wilderness treks, that’s a great horror movie that wants to explore more than the goriest kills (which it still does).
