Warning: the following contains major spoilers for In a Violent Nature.
Most seasoned horror fans have seen their share of slashers. From massive franchises to indie gems, this particular brand of scary movie follows a final girl and her friends as they’re terrorized by a masked killer with an ax to grind. Arguably originating from classics like Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the sub genre was codified in Carol Clover’s “Her Body, Himself” which opens Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, an academic study of the genre. This landmark essay coined the term “final girl” while identifying four additional slasher components. Clover summarizes “the killer is the psychotic product of a sick family, but still recognizably human; the victim is a beautiful, sexually active woman; the location is not-home, at a Terrible Place; the weapon is something other than a gun; the attack is registered from the victim’s point of view and comes with shocking suddenness.”
For decades horror creatives have taken stabs at these ingredients with unique variations of the tried and true formula. From unkillable monsters and legacy characters to meta commentary on horror itself, new slashers live and die by their ability to reconceive these five essential elements or make up for the lack thereof. Director Chris Nash goes back to the source with In a Violent Nature, a classic slasher film flipped on its head. Told from the killer’s point of view, Nash explores the side of Clover’s formula usually kept offscreen.
With a shifting point of view, this gory peek behind the curtain humanizes the slasher killer and posits that he may be one notable piece of a cruel and violent world.
THE TERRIBLE PLACE
Every slasher begins with an inciting evil. Whether the abandoned Myers house or a gas station doubling as a barbeque stand, the story’s violence stems from a sinister location that has seen the face of evil. Clover dubs this the Terrible Place and argues that its corrupting force comes from a history of sinister occupants or horrific injustice. Nash begins the film in his version of the Terrible Place: a tiny shack in the White Pines woods.
Seventy years ago, this wilderness was inhabited by loggers from a nearby camp who took out their rage on a price-gouging grocer by tormenting his mentally challenged son Johnny (Ry Barrett). After a cruel prank gone dreadfully wrong, officials covered up Johnny’s death and killed his father when he wouldn’t go along with the outrageous story. Legend has it that Johnny then rose from the dead and murdered everyone at camp while wearing the fireman’s mask that had been placed on his corpse. To conclude the story, a college-aged camper named Ehren (Sam Roulston) warns his friends that this powerful killer may still roam the woods searching for new victims.
As the site of his untimely demise and grisly revenge, the fire tower grounds have become a Terrible Place. After re-emerging ten years ago, a local Ranger (Reece Presley) buried his body in a shack deep in the woods marked only by a nondescript pole. A locket that once belonged to Johnny’s mother now hangs above the grave, sealing the restless spirit within the earth. When Ehren and his friends explore the makeshift graveyard, they take the locket and reignite the curse. Johnny claws his way out of the ground and embarks on a quest to recover this precious relic.
THE KILLER AND HIS WEAPONS
Ehren’s campfire story depicts Johnny as an unfortunate child, but the creature we see emerge from the ground is a hulking beast. Large and muscular, Nash’s killer wears tattered flannel over a rotting shirt and filthy jeans. He eventually dons the firefighter’s mask, completing the look of his legendary persona. At a nearby visitors center, Johnny also retrieves his signature weapon – a drag chain bookended by two powerful hooks. Clover notes that traditional slasher killers reject guns for stabbing weapons, blunt objects, and the occasional machine, describing them as “personal extensions of the body that bring attacker and attacked into primitive, animalistic embrace.”
True to form, Johnny never discharges a gun. When confronting the first victim, he grabs a rifle out of his hands, but discards the weapon a moment later. Several guns will be fired over the course of the story, but never by Johnny. His weapons include remnants of the logging camp – a long blade, a hatchet, and a gas-powered log splitter. Whether killing with a rock, a tool, or his bare hands, Johnny exemplifies Clover’s theory. Each murder is an intimate attack necessitating close proximity to the victim.
This formidable killer stalking the woods stands in sharp contrast to the man behind the mask. Distracted by a toy car on a keychain, Johnny plays with the tiny figurine and reveals his face for the first time. His eyes have the milky foam of death and decay while his lips have begun to rot after years buried in the earth. This bold choice humanizes the monster and signals a major shift in the film’s point of view. In this intimate moment, Nash expands the scope of the story and asks us to consider whether Johnny is the only villain in this cycle of violence.
THE VICTIMS
Following an initial kill, the slasher body count continues to grow. Though plenty of outliers exist, Clover describes noticeable patterns in these periodic deaths divided by gender. Older slashers frequently see male victims die quickly or offscreen while female victims are more likely to experience protracted suffering and perish under the male gaze. At first Nash appears to be following suit. The first male victim dies offscreen while the second is killed before laying eyes on Johnny – though his dismembered corpse becomes a grotesque tool. Nash next gives us two female campers who die in extended and horrifying sequences. Aurora (Charlotte Creaghan) in particular seems to bear out Clover’s theory. Not only does she see the killer before he strikes, she watches him pull her body apart. It’s a slow and methodical kill allowing the frightened girl plenty of time to witness the horror of her destruction.
However, Nash breaks with convention in the film’s most brutal sequence. When Johnny reunites with his old foe, the Ranger, he quickly gets the upper hand. Johnny breaks the man’s back and leaves him lying helpless on the ground while he sets up an unthinkable death. With the killer momentarily gone, we hear a motor start somewhere nearby. Johnny then reappears and drags the Ranger to an ominous shed. For the next few minutes, we watch as Johnny first tests a log splitter’s powerful blade then dismembers the unfortunate Ranger who remains alert and aware until the machine severs his head.
THE FINAL GIRL
The final element of Clover’s theory clicks into place with Kris (Andrea Pavlovic), the film’s final girl. Her androgynous name hints at Clover’s assertion that this archetypal character bridges the gap between feminized victims and the masculine killer. Kris is the first to sound the alarm – spotting Johnny in the background of a group selfie – and the only one pictured mourning the victims. Clover notes, “she is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror.”
Nash also plays with Johnny’s motives and implies that they are much more simple than previously believed. Rather than fixating on Kris, Johnny is solely concerned with finding his mother’s necklace. He is not a maniacal force hellbent on destruction, but a wounded man simply trying to retrieve what is his. Yes, he may kill those who cross his path, but each victim has some connection to the original evil of the Terrible Place. The Ranger not only buried him at the conclusion of a previous cycle, he is a descendant of the massacre’s sole survivor and a genetic link to the loggers who caused Johnny’s death. The college campers not only steal the locket, they pass on his story, perpetuating the legend of a masked villain stalking the woods.
Now the only one left, Kris abandons her plans for a showdown. As Johnny pulverizes the face of her last remaining friend, Kris slowly puts down her makeshift weapons. She also severs any link between herself and the killer by unclasping the necklace and leaving it behind. The film then shifts completely to her point of view. Kris may have “dropped the knife,” but she’s picked up the focus of the camera. Nash follows his final girl through the forest as we once followed Johnny. We continue to hear the ominous footsteps of an approaching monster, but have no way of knowing if he’s actually around. We have fully joined Kris’s perspective and cannot differentiate between her overwhelming fear and the actual sounds of an approaching threat.
THE POINT OF VIEW
Though the finale feels like an abrupt change, this shift has been building since the film’s second act. Nash humanizes the killer by showing his face and we begin to conflate the man with his victims. The next time Johnny attacks, the camera shifts to an overhead shot that removes our view of where he is going. We’re still following him, but we can no longer see his intended victims. As the story concludes, we briefly rejoin this powerful man, but will no longer solely consider his point of view.
During the next upsetting kill, we remain with the incapacitated Ranger as Johnny prepares his demise. In the shed, we stay with this frightened man, only glimpsing the killer’s hands and lower appendages as he operates the machine. A more traditional POV sequence, we focus on the victim as if seeing the death through Johnny’s eyes. But perhaps our empathy is still with the killer. If the Ranger’s plan is to once again put Johnny down, is he simply continuing the same decades-old injustice? Rather than killing an innocent victim, are we watching Johnny protect himself and relish in well-deserved revenge?
Nash’s final act is both frustrating and revelatory. Once Kris removes the locket, the camera begins to follow her. She is no longer transgressing and has regained her status as a victim. In a similar fashion, we stay a few feet behind her as she runs through the woods. Though her pace is more rushed, she has taken Johnny’s place as the narrative focus. Nodding to a multitude of classic slashers, Kris receives help from a passing motorist – played by Lauren-Marie Taylor from Friday the 13th Part 2. As they drive out of the forest, Nash flashes through serene footage of the surrounding woods, indicating the many places Johnny could be hiding. Kris continues to look out into the woods expecting to see a masked killer approach at any moment, but a final shot reveals that he has taken back his mother’s necklace. His mission accomplished, Johnny has reverted to another element of the natural world.
This shifting point of view not only allows us to identify with the killer but suggests that his victims are not so innocent. Nash bookends the film with the implication that the people Johnny encounters may be just as violent as the animalistic monster that haunts the White Pines woods. The story begins with campers robbing a grave and disturbing Johnny’s eternal slumber. They have no concept of the destructive cycle they will spark, but their viscous natures emerge as they bicker with each other throughout the film. The Ranger may be seeking to protect residents of the area, but he is still perpetuating a horrific crime and continuing to punish Johnny for his uncontrollable nature.
Before Johnny encounters humans, he finds the evidence of their destruction. Moments after emerging from the ground, he notices the pink markers of planned deforestation and an animal left in a trap to rot. The disturbing image foreshadows the motorist’s concluding monologue describing a violent animal that almost killed her brother. While surveying the woods, this former game warden discovered an animal solely interested in the thrill of destruction. Rather than hunt to feed, it would tear prey apart then simply move on. She may be unknowingly referencing Johnny’s previous cycle of violence, but she could also be describing Johnny’s first victim – a poacher who leaves animals to slowly die in painful traps. Perhaps Johnny is not the only murderous hunter in the forest. Throughout the film, Nash gives us several violent characters all seeking to escape or uphold this Terrible Place. Maybe Johnny is just trying to restore the natural order. By refusing to exclusively follow the killer, Nash updates the slasher to highlight the violent nature in us all.
In a Violent Nature is now playing in theaters nationwide.