Interviews
‘In a Violent Nature’ – How THAT Centerpiece Kill Came Together [Interview]
Experimental slasher In a Violent Nature, writer/director Chris Nash’s feature debut, sliced up an impressive opening weekend at the box office and received critical acclaim for its unique take on the slasher subgenre. But there’s one standout moment that has horror fans buzzing: a centerpiece kill so unexpected and gnarly that it ensures undead killer Johnny (Ry Barrett) is a slasher villain to remember.
In a Violent Nature frames the slasher events from the perspective of Johnny, summoned from the dead when a locket is removed from a collapsed fire tower in the woods that entombs his rotting corpse. In a recent chat, Chris Nash and Ry Barrett revealed just how tough this experimental slasher was to make, with Barrett joining the cast well into production, prompting extensive reshoots. That also applies to the aforementioned kill, which is best described as a “yoga pretzel.”
In this sequence, Johnny comes upon Aurora (Charlotte Creaghan) as she’s practicing yoga cliffside. He disembowels her with a rusty hook, then pulls her head back and through the gaping hole in her torso, contorting her body into a gruesome pretzel. It’s a scene that caught Barrett’s attention before taking the role.
Barrett explains, “When I read that in the script, that was the scene where I was like, ‘Okay, now we’re really getting into it.’ And it just kept going and going. There was another step to it, another step, and I was just like, ‘I wonder if they’re actually going to do all of this.‘ That’s what I was thinking. Then, sure enough, we did it all.
“That whole scene, actually, there’s a span of almost a year, from the lead-up to Johnny walking up to her, and then when the actual kill starts to happen; we didn’t have enough time to pull off the full effects of her getting killed,” he continues. “Then there was a weather thing or something, but we couldn’t shoot at that location. I think the weather maybe didn’t match or something, so we had to go back on another block and pick up the rest of that kill from the point of literally just the hook. So, there was almost a whole year in between that location and coming back to it. They went and re-matched the weeds and the leaves and everything to look like that. But I mean, I’ve watched the movie twice now, and even knowing that, I haven’t noticed it.“
The actor also walks us through what’s going through Johnny’s mind at that particular moment.
“Personally, I tried to give Johnny, just for his motivation, he’s a bit of a wild animal, and there’s no logic at certain points other than he’s on this one mission to get this thing back,“ Barrett explains. “I think everything else in between is just whatever comes in his way in getting to that main goal; he just doesn’t want to deal with it, basically. I looked at him as a wild animal, as something that belonged where he was, and everything else to him didn’t belong there other than the trees and nature. That was my mentality of looking into things.
“I think the yoga pretzel was that Chris wanted to do something so different and crazy, with so many steps to it, that it was just something that no one would’ve ever seen before. Then having it on this setting of this cliff top just added to everything, too.“
Extensive reshoots meant that this impressive sequence was also affected, and Nash details just how tricky the standout kill was to execute. More specifically, Nash reveals just how long it took to pull this moment together.
Nash tells us, “All the pieces were filmed months and months apart. We started filming that in early May, and then we filmed a second chunk of it, the majority chunk in August. Then, we did pickups in December in my producer’s mother’s backyard. That kill especially is made up of little different tableaus of inner spice, little details of what’s happening to the victim’s body. Building everything was quite difficult, but it wasn’t that difficult to piece it all together. For instance, the one shot that we got in the producer’s mother’s backyard was when the character’s neck is down and we just see a little bit of vertebrae pop up out of her neck. That was just angled downwards, so we can just throw a bunch of dirt on the ground and kind of cover everything up.
“The only thing that we had to fight was the fact that there was a huge seasonal change between May and August in Northern Ontario,“ Nash continues. “Luckily, we were mainly shooting into the sky because it’s an elevated area. There were ways that we could get around it for sure. As far as where I came up with and how I envisioned that one, I was always trying to figure out deaths that were very specific and unique to his implements. So I was just thinking, for that one especially, what can I do with the hooks? A knife wouldn’t work the same. So yeah. I can’t tell you exactly where it started, but the whole step-by-step process was, ‘How could this get worse?‘ And just coming to a point where ‘There’s no fixing this. Even if you called the doctor right now, there’s no help.'”
Prosthetic effects lead Steven Kostanski (Psycho Goreman, The Void) emphasized just how much shifted in production, save for Aurora’s unforgettable demise. He details, “Some stuff had to get truncated a bit. There were certain kills where they had to simplify them, but that was more on a production level, not necessarily the gag itself. The Aurora death, where she gets spiked in the head and pulled through her own stomach, I feel like he had that from the beginning and was dead set on making that happen. That was definitely one of the more ambitious gags that he hard committed to making sure we got on screen. Thankfully, with all those big sequences, he would do simple storyboards for them so I could at least have a sense of what I’m looking at in the frame. Because in prosthetics and in effect, it’s always about where can I hide blood tubes, where can I hide people? What is the action that the shot needs, and what do I need to do to sell that illusion? Chris was really good about committing to how to shoot this stuff and giving me that direction so I knew how to pull off the illusion.”
Kostanski breaks the kill down, “It’s an elaborate gag, so the problem is that it all can’t be done in one body. While in the scene, it feels like it’s one thing happening. It’s actually multiple bodies doing different things. It was just time contingent, like how much time do you have to set up and blood rig and prep these things on a day, so it necessitated shooting it over multiple days. Again, just how elaborate it was. I built a chunk of it, Chris built a chunk of it. The beat where her spine was separating was all Chris. He built that on his own, and I was more just focused on getting the actual three Aurora bodies ready to go.
“One of them was built just for taking the spike in the head and starting to tilt down, and then the second body was taking it from 90 degrees into the stomach, and then the third body was pulling the head through the stomach. Because obviously, the cavity that Johnny punches through her stomach is only so big. So, on that third and final body, we had to cheat it a lot bigger to accommodate a head pushing through. Yeah, it was just a very elaborate gag with a lot of moving parts, a lot of pieces, and it just necessitated shooting it over multiple days.”
Of course, Aurora’s standout death isn’t the only grisly end for the film’s unlucky campers. But for Kostanski, it’s still his favorite. He says, “That Aurora kill is so iconic that it’s hard not to pick that one because I’ve never seen that before, and that was Chris’s intention, to actually do something that had never been done. I think it fully succeeds at that. It’s a pretty insane moment. That really summarizes the movie, which is full of subtlety and more of a tone poem-type scenes, and then we cut into a girl getting a spike in her head and pulled through her own stomach. I think that chaotic opposition to the two types of movies happening in the same movie is what makes it so interesting and fun. Yeah, I’d say the Aurora kill is the best one.”
In a Violent Nature is now playing in theaters nationwide.
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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