Stream It Or Skip It: ‘In a Violent Nature’ on Shudder, a Wonderfully Putrid, Stylistically Innovative Slasher Flick

In a Violent Nature ( now streaming on Shudder ) dares to strip the slasher movie down to its most minimalist form: no music, very few POV shifts, no baloney – just stalking and killing. First-time feature filmmaker Chris Nash is to blame for this near-experimental gorefest that follows around the character who’s always the most interesting one in a slasher: the killer. Right? Do we REALLY care about squabbling, horny, mostly drunk morons hanging out in a cabin? No. Never! But the big question is, will we want to spend 90 minutes with a maniac instead?

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The Gist: The first shot of this movie holds for several minutes on a near-abstract patch of damp ground in the woods. We hear people blibber-blabbering in the background and eventually a gold locket hanging on an object comes into focus. Someone takes it, and before you can recite War and Peace from memory – hey, it’s a pretty long shot – UP from the FILTH emerges a man who probably isn’t much of a man anymore. We don’t see his face (yet) but his skin ain’t right, and he’s always damp near to the point of dripping, and I don’t think he has any fingernails left, and if I’m not mistaken, there’s something metallic lodged in the back of his pasty head. Ghoul city, bro. Ghoul city.

The camera follows this guy as he tromps through the woods. He visits a local redneck for something a bit more aggressive than tea and crumpets, then finds the blibber-blabberers from the opening scene. Seven of them. Parked around a campfire, smokin’ dope. It’s dark, nighttime. Where are they sleeping tonight? In a Cabin In The Woods, of course. Where else are they gonna sleep? They tell a creepy campfire story about a gent named Johnny who was an object of torment and died in the woods, and now haunts the woods. Hmm. Is Johnny (Ry Barrett) our slasher? Hint: I wouldn’t’ve put the actor’s name in parentheses after the character’s name if it wasn’t.

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And so Johnny gets to work. What does he do? What he does best. He has quite the nose for finding old tools that are still somehow rather effective at cutting through things, things like human flesh and bone. He trods to the local ranger station, where he finds drag hooks and a hewing ax (there were very helpful little signs next to them!) in a display case full of antiques. He also finds an old firefighter’s mask, and that way we can get a frontal view of the guy, therefore pushing his face reveal to a scene later in the movie. Now what, pray tell, might Johnny do with drag hooks and a hewing ax? Some logging, perhaps? Decorate the walls of his home – surely a quaint little cottage full of adorbs farmhouse decor – with some antique gear? Or perhaps something else?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: In a Violent Nature is absolutely hacked off the same slab of beef as Halloween and Friday the 13th , albeit with some of the austere visual style of something like It Follows .

Performance Worth Watching: As one of the (seemingly doomed) Cabin In The Woodsers, Andrea Pavlovic plays the only real character in the film, and she gets a somewhat shallow “arc” that allows her to utter the film’s best line, which is…

Memorable Dialogue: “It was an animal.” – Pavolovic’s Kris can’t bring herself to say what really happened back there in the woods

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: This cabin in the woods has been stripped down to the studs. It needed to be done, too, since this genre exhausted its tropes long ago, and has been repeating them over and over and over again for decades. So with In a Violent Nature , Nash essentially deconstructs the slasher flick, eliminating all baloney pretense by adhering to the perspective of a killer who pretty clearly ceased being fully human long ago. Do we ever really care about the victims in these films? Emphatic answer: No! We’re here to see them eat it in the most disgusting fashion. This film ups the ante by its almost-documentary M.O., and its unblinkingly blunt style gives it a fresh, almost admirable bleakness that other films of this ilk are too wishy-washy to indulge.

About that killer. Johnny has more in common with a zombie than anything else. It’s nice to spend some quality time with him, even though he’s rendered a tantalizing mystery – as the camera follows him through lengthy treks through the woods, I couldn’t help but wonder if he needs to eat, and if so what it might be, or if he breathes oxygen like the rest of us. There’s sufficient evidence to say that he doesn’t need any of this, that he exists to kill and only to kill. The “character” is rendered with admirable efficiency. If only we regular humans could declutter our lives in such a manner, right? Simplify, simplify, simplify! (Someone should do a fully third-person-POV Godzilla movie next, where we just follow the monster stomp by stomp and chomp by chomp, cutting out the phony BS presumption that we care about any of the human characters in the story.)

It’s a widely held notion among gore mavens that the genre’s biggest selling point is The Kills, which are its only true point of innovation. The more vile and repulsive The Kills, the more praise we heap on the depraved mind that came up with them. In a Violent Nature delivers on that front, using long takes and wonderfully putrid practical effects to render them memorable. I won’t spoil any details, but I will say that one is so patiently methodical that it’s funny, another is so repetitive that it’s deeply disturbing, and a third I’ll simply dub The Ol’ Inside-Out. There are plot holes here, and they’re big enough to allow a wildebeest stampede to pass through, but The Kills? They’re amazing. Best I’ve seen in quite a stretch. And maybe that’s all that matters.

Our Call: Sickos, take heed: In a Violent Nature is some fairly innovative wickedness. It defies enough of the conventional rules of the genre, it might be the final nail in the slasher-movie coffin. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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