Interviews
‘In a Violent Nature’ Director Reveals How His Unique Slasher Was Reshot Almost Entirely [Interview]
Writer/Director Chris Nash’s feature debut, In a Violent Nature, is set to unleash an arthouse twist on the slasher in theaters this Friday, but the journey getting there has been long and arduous. So much so that Nash reshot a large percentage of the film just to get it, and the gory practical effects, just right.
That included a recast of the film’s undead slasher villain, Johnny (Ry Barrett), who is unwittingly summoned when a locket is removed from a collapsed fire tower in the woods that entombs his rotting corpse. That spells terrible news for the campers vacationing in his territory.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with filmmaker Chris Nash and star Ry Barrett ahead of the film’s theatrical release about Johnny’s nature and the tough hurdles in making this unique indie horror film. The inspiration behind In a Violent Nature, Nash reveals, didn’t actually originate from iconic slashers, and that informed his overall approach to the arthouse horror movie.
Nash tells us, “I took a lot of inspiration from Gus Van Sant’s 2000s work of Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days. I love those movies, and I really wanted to see what I could do to bring that into a genre film. The slasher just seemed like the best way to do that; especially, the ‘slasher in the woods’ type of thing. We can really just hang out in that environment. But the main thing for nailing the tone was really, I think, just stepping back and letting the scenes just exist as they were and not even aiming for a tone.
“It was a weird thing talking it over with Pierce Derks, my cinematographer,” Nash continues. “We didn’t have the biggest budget to do something crazy and wild with lighting and stuff, and I was like, ‘Well, let’s just go super naturalistic.’ He said, “Yeah, no look is also a look.” So, this is very much a ‘no tone is a tone’ type of movie. We tried to treat it almost like making a nature documentary where we’re just following something, or following a letter carrier at work, just going from house to house. It’s not the most thrilling work in the world, but it’s honest work. That’s how we approached it, being as objective as we could.”
What is a nature documentary without a subject? In a Violent Nature finds it in the undead Johnny, quietly stalking through the woods for large swaths of the runtime. What was Nash looking for when searching for the right actor to play the killer, you might be wondering?
“I’m still trying to answer that question myself,” Nash responds. “I definitely feel like we found it, and we lucked out with Ry. Ry actually stepped in to replace the actor that we originally had cast as Johnny. This was one of the problems that we faced during our first attempt at shooting, as the actor that we had portraying Johnny had to step away for medical reasons. So we had replacements come in. At the time, we were thinking, ‘This isn’t going to be too much of a problem because he’s in a costume the whole time.’ But when you’re following this mute character, as an audience, you’re picking up on everything. When you don’t have those visual cues, you’re just seeing all the physicality and the tiny, tiny differences between posture, between where people actually hold their weight when they’re walking, and just the size of the gate itself.
Nash continues, “It was pretty shocking and pretty jarring when we had that assembly together of like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s that actor. That’s that actor.’ We could see that it was completely different. So, when we asked Ry to step in, we did a lot of rehearsals with him. We talked about how to walk. He actually did research himself. He was watching animal videos, just nature videos of animals walking to try to just get a feel for how a predator would walk around the woods stalking its prey.”
Barrett corroborated, “They had an initial shoot that I wasn’t a part of, and that was about a full year before they approached me and had decided to reshoot. At that time, I don’t think it was a plan to reshoot everything, but there were key scenes and key moments that they definitely had to 100% go back and redo. The entire film is pivoting on his movements and everything; I think you’d be able to tell if suddenly it was somebody different. So then the decision, on top of a bunch of other factors, was made to reshoot the entire thing. I was really happy to be on board, and the fact that they were going to do that, and to kind of build this character and just be there for all of it.”
As for Barrett’s process of cracking his character, he looked to Nash’s script.
“I think Johnny is supposed to be a bit of a mystery, psychologically and what is going through his head,” Barrett explains. “It was more about, I think, treating him like an animal, like a wild animal sort of, and that’s what the analogy [in the film] sort of encapsulates: what Johnny is and how he works. I looked at it that way because of that. The monologue that Lauren Taylor gives is that he’s like a wild animal, a bear that just has something wrong, and that’s how he operates. It doesn’t necessarily make sense what he’s doing, but it does to him.”
“The suit really lends itself to the character,“ Barrett elaborates. “I had my rules that I stuck to, but once you get into the suit as Johnny, it kind of just locks everything into place. Getting the suit on wasn’t too extensive of a thing. There was an underlayer, like Under Armor, with skin, latex skin, and everything looking like it’s rotted underneath the pants and underneath the shirt. Then there was either a cowl I wore some days with an open mask that you’d see the back of Johnny’s head, and then other days there was the mask, the full mask, and then some days we had the mask that had a cutout so I could see better and move better. The only the real day that took the most time was the day where you actually see Johnny’s face. That was a longer makeup day because that was a full application and took probably close to three hours.”
It wasn’t just the actor that changed during the reshoots, but Johnny’s design, too. Nash walks us through some of those key changes that ended up improving upon his original vision.
Nash explains, “Watching the assembly cut, we realized that there were small things that we could improve upon that just changed the tone rather dramatically. For instance, how far we followed behind Johnny with the camera, just giving him that perfect amount of space in the frame. Because we were a lot closer the first time around, and the second time around, we were like, ‘We need to pull back a lot further.‘ Another thing that we were looking at was we actually redesigned the weather mask. It was a much more accurate depiction of what the actual firefighting mask was in real life, but we realized that it kind of looked a little too much like a diving bell; it looked a little too goofy. So, we redesigned it, made it a lot more form-fitting to his head, and gave it that goggle look for just kind of more of a piercing eye.”
“There were so many things we took away from the first time around, even just how we were achieving some gore gags, little flourishes we could throw in,” he adds. “So I don’t recommend, and I also very much recommend, reshooting movies in their entirety before you release them.”
Check out In a Violent Nature in theaters this weekend, and stay tuned for a follow-up interview piece here on Bloody Disgusting about the film’s practical effects and gory kills.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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