A Day in the Death

In a Violent Nature
Written and directed by Chris Nash
Shudder, IFC Films, May 2024

There were a number of books vying to dominate my attention today, and that’s the way I prefer things to be. I cover both books and movies here, after all, and I do not intend to slight the literary part of the equation, but it is more satisfying on a personal level to cover superior achievements by authors whose futures can actually be affected by the, I don’t know, seventeen readers of this column—I joke, I joke!—more primally than movies are, even obscure movies, with superior public relation resources behind them.

But, no, this time our focus goes directly to a movie, one that will either be wholly obscure or wholly the obsession of its own cult, and boy, do I admire the hell out of it, even though it belongs to a subgenre I have come to despise: what Harlan Ellison called the knife-kill movie, what Roger Ebert called the dead teenager movie, what Joe Bob Briggs called the spam-in-a-cabin movie, and what we all know as the slasher movie. I mean it when I say I have come to hate that genre.

I was a deep fan—perhaps too great a fan—of the original Halloween, and I developed an attachment to its star, Jamie Lee Curtis. I followed the sequels even when I hated them, and fortunately moved on to the many other films where she excelled. But I really hated the Friday the 13th series, which struck me as Halloween for viewers of the sort who loathed suspense and style and carried stop-watches in order to time the intervals between each kill.

The problem is that I like my horror to be about something, really, and, to me, the subgenre rapidly became about little more than figuring out new ways to mutilate the cast and then celebrate the highlights in horror movie magazines. Yuck, I thought. Yuck.

There are many, many films bloodier than anything in this subgenre—though today’s example makes me hesitate before saying so—that I would defend it as entertainment and as art even while loathing 99% of movies that begin with the premise of a masked maniac killing every young person they can, whether on a college campus or in a cabin in the woods. They strike me as, for the most part, anti-art, and I’m the guy who, in one of my stories available at Nightmare¹, stacked bloody corpses five stories high. Nihilism and “about something” are not necessarily opposites, but they don’t mesh easily.

And yet there is now the film In a Violent Nature, written and directed by Chris Nash and starring Ryan Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, and Charlotte Creaghan. Also in a key role is Lauren-Marie Taylor, who was in Friday the 13th, Part 2 (1981). The story provides us with Johnny, an undead revenant of the Jason or Michael Myers sort, whose eternal rest is disturbed when a passing asshole steals the locket that keeps him in the ground, a story element that has been labeled in many places as “the trespass.”

Johnny immediately digs his way out of his grave and begins a relentless march through the woods, intent on finding the locket while, not incidentally, killing everybody he encounters on the way. In the course of his travels, we pick up indications that this film is to be taken as the equivalent of the second or third entry in a long-running series, whose other continuing character is a park ranger who has faced him before and knows all about him; and that it contains, off-screen but nevertheless noted, such de rigueur elements as the scared girls at a gas station, terrified to find out that this installment’s supply of twenty-something future victims are staying in this particular cabin in these particular woods. (We hear all about them.) The fidelity to formula is absolute, rigorously so, and the question you now ask, reasonably enough, is, “So why the hell was this movie even worth making? Why would you even be talking about it? What’s so different about it?”

And the answer is: Johnny is pretty much the main character, more so than Michael or Jason ever were. We follow his activities over the next few days, following from a POV that is mostly just over his shoulder, and it mostly involves a lot of determined walking, with some lurking, that allows him to listen in as, for instance, a group of temporarily intact campers sit around a fire and are regaled with his backstory. There’s a lot of overheard dialogue from these characters, who take about as long to realize that they’re being stalked as their type always does, which is to say just a little longer than it takes to establish them as intolerable. Sometimes, we are given a minute or two closer to them, for clarity’s sake, but there’s a whole lot of story we are encouraged to fill in, as when Johnny thuds toward a pair who are preparing to bug out, and all the implied scenes that occur before are knowledge we can intuit. The paradox here is that while the killer’s point of view in places like the Jason movies helped make the killer reprehensible by inviting us to root for him, the unsparing focus in this film, including the murders—sometimes filmed close up, and other times, more remarkably, at great distances—magnifies the terror we’re supposed to feel. Honestly, this was horrifying and grand meta-commentary on the entire idea of this subgenre.

I’m sure some of you want to know if the murders themselves are “any good.” That’s a weird way to put it, but yeah, they are “good.” There’s one—you’ll know it because it takes place on the edge of a cliff—that is incredibly over the top, and another involving a heavy rock as a bludgeon, that is profoundly simple but staged with something like genius. Indeed, “staged with genius” is the default here. The best killing is filmed from overhead, as if being watched by a dispassionate god. The most heartbreaking takes place from a sad distance.

When all the characters who would provide our “spam” in any other film are here mostly seen and heard from a distance, but critically with a clarity that allows us to know exactly where they are in relation to our protagonist Johnny, the paradoxical effect is that, honestly, this becomes genuinely scary stuff. It is. I think it’s as fine an iteration as the subgenre has ever known, and one of the few times since Halloween (and I again mean the original, not any of the sequels), that my visceral reaction was better than ennui and self-contempt. This one is, I have to say, about something, even if that’s the genre of which it is a part. It’s self-examination. I must say I think Harlan would be disappointed with me for loving it.

Also, there may be some soundtrack music somewhere. I don’t recall there being any. All the sound in any important scene is just what is there in the story: future victims arguing in the distance, Johnny thudding along through wilderness paths for what we are to understand is hours on end. This movie comes by its chills honestly, without sweetening strings. And then it deliberately departs from its format near the end and allows one character to deliver a monologue that ties a bow on everything we’ve seen. It is maddening, in all the right ways. By the time this review sees print, the movie will be long out of theatres, but it is coming to Shudder, which is also accessible via Amazon Prime. See it then.

¹. “Red Rain,” Nightmare Magazine, June 2018.