"Animals don't get too hung up on reason. They just keep killing."
— Mystery woman
In a Violent Nature is a 2024 Canadian Slasher Movie. It is directed by Chris Nash and stars Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love, Reece Presley and Liam Leone.
The film is set up as a classical slasher with a group of hormonally stressed out children going to the Ontario wilderness for fun and leisure only for them to be targeted by a mute and merciless madman. The twist? The story is told from the perspective of the killer instead of the teenagers. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 22, 2024 and is set for theatrical release on May 31, 2024.
Previews: Trailer 1
In a Violent Nature contains examples of the following:
- All There in the Manual: According to the official synopsis, the killer's name is Johnny.
- Bear Trap: The killer has these scattered across the forest to catch either animals or humans.
- Decon-Recon Switch: Of slasher movies. It's told from the POV of the slasher instead of the victims, goes a lot into exploring how said killer pulls off his actions, and deliberately eschews the genre's usual energetic B-Movie vibe for a much slower and more cerebral cinema verite style. Yet it's all ultimately still a horror story about a nigh-unstoppable killer hunting down terrified campers and plays it's premise totally straight rather than tearing down the idea of it.
- Don't Go in the Woods: The main location, and domain of the killer, is a forest found in Ontario.
- In the Style of: Friday the 13th in the style of indie slow cinema and experimental films by directors such as Gus Van Sant or Terrence Malick.
- Implacable Man: The killer dispatches of everybody who stands between him and his mother's necklace in unnecessarily brutal ways and even being shot in the chest only takes him out for a short time.
- Leave the Camera Running: Lots of slow, methodical long takes to be found here.
- Malevolent Masked Man: The killer's defining feature is a brown mask with large goggles.
- Minimalism: The film strips the concept of a slasher movie down to it's bare essentials. Long quiet takes, no musical score, little conventional exposition, an emphasis on visual storytelling, and a very simple, straightforward plot. It's just a guy in the woods hunting a group of college students.
- Mundane Horror: One of the unsettling aspects of the premise is that we follow a random but dangerous man who targets random teenagers just to satisfy his own twisted nature.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: One of the kills involve the slasher hitting a guy with a hammer. Over and over and over and over...
- Perspective Flip: The big gimmick of the movie is that it's a slasher movie told from the perspective of the slasher instead of his victims, following his day-to-day life and what slasher villains like him do "off-screen" to hunt and kill their prey.
- Revenant Zombie: The killer is revived from the dead when somebody steals his mother's necklace that soothed his soul and he kills everybody that stands between him and the necklace.
- Villain Protagonist: The main character is a mysterious killer who makes his way in attacking the teenagers who cross in his territory.
