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‘In a Violent Nature 2’ First Look—”More Kills, More Blood, More Iconic”

Published

2 months ago

February 10, 2026

Johnny’s coming back. And he’s bringing exponentially more carnage.

Paris-based sales powerhouse Charades has officially boarded the sequel to 2024’s cult arthouse slasher hit and is gearing up to unleash it on international buyers at the European Film Market in Berlin.

Translation: The slow-burn massacre that made Sundance audiences squirm is about to go global in a big way.

Charades Promises “Exponential Ultraviolence”

The sequel reunites producer Peter Kuplowsky with the sales team he’s worked with since the gonzo days of Psycho Goreman. In a statement, Kuplowsky didn’t mince words about his ongoing relationship with Charades, noting his history with the company dates back to that gloriously absurd alien splatterfest.

“We are thrilled that they continue to have a taste for our gory genre delights,” Kuplowsky said, before laying out what fans can expect from round two with the undead killer.

“With this sequel, fans can expect an exponential increase of the ol’ ultraviolence with a distinct hook, but one that still collides with storied slasher traditions.”

Exponential ultraviolence. Let that sink in for a moment, especially if you’ve seen the yoga kill from the first film.

Charades co-founders Carole Baraton, Pierre Mazars, and Yohann Comte were equally enthusiastic, calling the sequel “a first feature, driven by a new vision, with more kills, more blood, hopefully even more iconic.”

What We Know About the Sequel

The original In a Violent Nature shook up the slasher formula by framing the entire blood-soaked rampage from Johnny’s perspective. Following the silent, relentless killer through the Canadian wilderness as he methodically dispatched victims in increasingly brutal ways. It premiered at Sundance 2024, earned a theatrical release through IFC Films and Shudder, and became an instant cult favorite for its atmospheric slow-burn approach to extreme violence.

The sequel went into production back in September in Canada with writer-director Chris Nash returning alongside producer Shannon Hanmer. Development is being overseen by Emily Gotto, Nicholas Lazo, and Samuel Zimmerman for Shudder.

Kuplowsky has previously described the original film as being “conceived as a meta-sequel within a fictional slasher series,” meaning they were always envisioning mayhem beyond the first movie’s scope. Now they’re getting the chance to deploy Johnny “as a conduit to further experiments in the genre.”

The Charades Connection

For those keeping score, this marks another significant genre collaboration between Kuplowsky and Charades. The sales company handled international distribution for Psycho Goreman back in 2019-2020, helping turn that gloriously deranged kids-meet-alien-warlord comedy into a worldwide cult phenomenon.

They also handled the first In a Violent Nature, with the Charades team comparing it to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and calling it the discovery of an incredibly talented director.

Now they’re betting big on the sequel.

What to Expect at EFM

The European Film Market runs concurrently with the Berlin International Film Festival, and it’s where international distributors shop for their next big acquisitions. Charades isn’t just bringing In a Violent Nature 2 to the market. They’re giving it what they’re calling “a big market push,” which in sales-speak means they believe this thing has serious commercial potential beyond the arthouse horror crowd.

They’ll also be shopping Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s first-ever period drama Kokurojo: The Samurai and the Prisoner, Louis Paxton’s Sundance debut The Incomer, and Yoshitoshi Shinomiya’s A New Dawn (competing at Berlinale). But let’s be real, Johnny’s the one we’re watching.

The Bottom Line

If you thought the first film’s infamous yoga kill was brutal, you’re not ready for what “exponential ultraviolence” means. The original film built its reputation on patient, atmospheric dread punctuated by jaw-dropping practical gore effects. The sequel promises to dial that up while maintaining Nash’s experimental approach to slasher conventions.

No release date has been announced yet, but with production wrapped and Charades pushing it hard at Berlin, expect news soon on when Johnny will resume his restless, murderous walk through the woods.

And when he does? Cover your eyes. Or don’t. That’s kind of the whole point.

Stay tuned for more details as they emerge from the EFM.

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This Week in Horror: CinemaCon Delivered, Nicolas Cage Is Coming Back, and Someone Let Ti West Near a Christmas Story

Published

2 days ago

April 17, 2026

Luna Gray

It was a big week. CinemaCon happened, a Longlegs sequel got announced, and Lee Cronin’s The Mummy opened today, which we already covered but deserves to be in the roundup anyway because it is the biggest horror release of the month, and you should go see it. Here is everything else.

CinemaCon: The Horror Stuff

CinemaCon ran April 13 through 16 in Las Vegas and there was a lot. Here is what matters to us.

Werwulf got a real trailer, and it looks unhinged in the best way.

Robert Eggers’ follow-up to Nosferatu showed up at Universal’s presentation and it sounds like exactly what you want it to be. Aaron Taylor-Johnson transforms into a werewolf. Grimy medieval England. Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, and Ralph Ineson are all in this. Variety called the transformation sequence alone worth the price of admission.

Practical Magic 2 happened and it was genuinely emotional.

Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman walked out together at Warner Bros.’ presentation and the room apparently lost it. The sequel reunites the Owens sisters, brings back Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing, and adds Maisie Williams and Xolo Maridueña as the next generation. They rebuilt the original house on the cliff. Sally is single now. If you know the original film you know why.

Ti West and Johnny Depp are making a Christmas horror movie and I have questions.

Paramount showed first footage from Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, directed by Ti West and starring Depp in prosthetics as Scrooge. Ian McKellen is Jacob Marley. The Ghost of Christmas Present apparently shows up with his ribcage open. It is a Ti West film, so presumably this will be deeply upsetting by the end. Filing this under “extremely interested and also a little scared.”

Scary Movie is coming back June 5.

The original cast is back. Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris, Regina Hall. The footage shown at Paramount’s panel apparently goes after reboots, remakes, elevated horror, and origin stories. That is a lot of ground to cover.

The Longlegs Universe Is Expanding

Osgood Perkins and Nicolas Cage are doing another Longlegs film, this time at Paramount, which picked it up because the scope was apparently bigger than Neon could handle. Not calling it a sequel exactly, more like something set in the same universe.

The Terror Is Back

The Terror: Devil in Silver drops May 7 on AMC+ and Shudder, and it looks like a proper return for the anthology. Dan Stevens stars as Pepper, a man committed to a psychiatric hospital who starts wondering if what he is experiencing is supernatural or if he is actually losing his mind. Based on Victor LaValle’s novel of the same name, who is also the showrunner. Judith Light, CCH Pounder, Stephen Root, and Marin Ireland are in the cast. Ridley Scott remains an executive producer. The first two seasons of The Terror were genuinely excellent, and this one has the cast to back it up.

Also Worth Knowing

Faces of Death is in theaters now and sitting at 69% on Rotten Tomatoes. Directed by Daniel Goldhaber, stars Barbie Ferreira as a content moderator who finds what might be real execution videos on a TikTok-style platform. It is a smart premise and the reviews say it mostly delivers.

Passenger got a trailer this week. André Øvredal, who directed The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, is calling it his scariest film yet. A supernatural entity latches onto a couple on a road trip.

The Young People from Osgood Perkins is still coming October 30, which means we are getting two Perkins-adjacent projects in the same year. This one stars Lola Tung, Nico Parker, Tatiana Maslany and Nicole Kidman and follows two school friends whose relationship turns sinister as one starts exhibiting disturbing behavior. Between this, Werwulf, and Other Mommy, fall 2026 is looking very good.

That is the week. Go see The Mummy.

News

The Dark Side of Paradise: Why Tropical Horror Hits Different

Published

2 days ago

April 17, 2026

Luna Gray

There is something specifically wrong about horror that happens in bright sunshine on white sand. It shouldn’t work. Scary things are supposed to happen in the dark, not on a sunny beach. Yet, here we are.

The genre has spent decades training audiences to associate danger with darkness. Shadows, fog, rain, winter, the absence of light. Remove all of those cues and drop the horror into a tropical afternoon and trained horror fans no longer know what to look for.

The Cognitive Dissonance

We are conditioned to believe paradise is safe. Blue water, palm trees, sunlight. These are vacation images. Relaxation images. Nothing bad is supposed to happen here.

Daylight horror is one of the hardest subgenres to execute because there is nowhere to hide the ugliness. In darkness, the imagination fills gaps. In sunlight, everything is visible, and the film has to make that visibility the threat.

What results is a specific kind of dread. The feeling that the pleasant surface of things is a lie, and always has been.

Midsommar and What Daylight Does

Midsommar is the most discussed recent example, a film set almost entirely in golden Swedish summer light where the horror is hyper-visible by design. There is no darkness to retreat into. Every ritual, every atrocity, happens in front of everyone, in full color, in the sun.

The film’s director of photography Pawel Pogorzelski described the approach as weaponizing the light. Making the brightness feel oppressive rather than comforting. There is no relief. The beauty of the setting becomes part of the trap.

The setting promises safety and delivers the opposite.

Key West Was Always Haunted

Key West has a specific advantage for horror that most tropical settings don’t, it’s actually dark underneath. The Spanish named it Cayo Hueso, “island of bones,” for the human remains found scattered on its beaches when they arrived. It has been shaped by disease, hurricanes, shipwrecks, piracy, slavery, and execution.

In 1996, David L. Sloan founded what became the first professional ghost tour operation in the United States, right there in Key West. The island’s paranormal history wasn’t invented for tourism. The tourism caught up with what was already there.

The palm trees and turquoise water are real. So are three centuries of unquiet dead.

Tropical Horror in the Genre

The Ruins, Triangle, and the broader tradition of island and beach horror keep returning to paradise as the place where the worst things happen. The genre returns to these settings because they keep working. The contradiction between beauty and violence never gets old.

The tropical setting also erases the usual horror toolkit. No dark forests, no ruined buildings, no convenient fog. The monster has nowhere to hide. Neither does anyone else.

Which Is Exactly Why We Set Our Horror Movie There

iHorror is making a horror-comedy called Key of Bones: Curse of the Ghost Pirate, filmed entirely on location in Key West. Not as a backdrop. In Key West specifically, because Key West is not actually paradise. It just looks like it.

News

Thinestra Review: Almost as Sharp as It Thinks It Is

Published

3 days ago

April 16, 2026

Luna Gray

No one would blame you for looking at Thinestra and thinking, “oh, it’s The Substance again.” Both films use an underexplained beauty product as a way to navigate how women are treated in entertainment and the pressure to always be beautiful. While The Substance goes after how women are treated in front of the camera, Thinestra gives us a glimpse behind the scenes.

It has things to say. Whether it says them clearly is a different question.

Meet Penny

Our protagonist is Penny, a young visual editor played by Michelle Macedo. Specifically, she edits the photos of paper thin models. She is surrounded by perfection all day and none of it is hers. After asking one of the models what it feels like to be perfect, she is handed a mystery pill with no explanation.

Something in the Ozempic family, as the film frames it, which is a good choice given that we are living through a cultural moment where weight loss drugs are reshaping beauty standards in real time. After struggling with her size for a bit, Penny pops the thing and waits to see what happens. You know, normal Tuesday activity.

What happens is that the weight she loses comes back. As her. Penelope, played by Michelle’s actual identical twin, Melissa Macedo, shows up as the ravenous doppelganger Penny just shed. The twin casting is not a gimmick. It is the smartest thing the film does. There is something genuinely uncanny about watching two identical people share a frame when one of them is supposed to be the literal embodiment of everything the other one is running from.

All of this plays out against a sweltering Los Angeles Christmas, which is its own kind of horror.

The Good Stuff

The first thing that comes to mind when watching Thinestra is odd. This is not a derogatory remark. Odd is always good in horror. The film features a toilet twin, a donut chamber, and a surprising amount of evil food. All of these things work beautifully for the comedy side of the film. Director Nathan Hertz has a clear vision for the film’s more absurdist moments and those moments land.

Hertz has said in press materials that “Penelope is not the villain. She is the symptom. The real antagonist is the voice in Penny’s head that tells her she is not enough.” That is a genuinely good thesis. The film knows what it is trying to do. Whether it follows through is the issue.

Where It Falls Apart

Thinestra never finds its balance between drama and comedy. Some scenes are over the top silly while others go immediately deadpan. The film is engaged in a kind of tonal whiplash that makes it difficult to stay invested in what is actually happening to Penny on an emotional level. You get pulled out right when you should be pulled in.

The special effects have the same problem. The donut dungeon looks disgusting and wonderfully delicious all at once, and it works. Some of the body horror effects do not hold up as well. It is worth noting that this is an indie production and budget has a lot to do with that. But the inconsistency is still noticeable in a way that undercuts the scarier moments.

The Bigger Picture

Thinestra comes from a long line of feminist body horror, and it genuinely tries to tackle heavy subjects. The Ozempic framing is timely in a way that The Ugly Stepsister and The Substance were not quite working with, and that specificity gives the film a sharp cultural edge when it leans into it. The problem is that it does not always lean into it. It gets distracted by its own weirdness, which is charming, but removes the atmosphere that would make the horror actually hurt.

This is not a bad film. Thinestra is funny, gross, and imaginative in ways most Hollywood films are not. It took home the VORTEX Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror Award Grand Prize on the festival circuit and screened at Sitges, Raindance, and Screamfest, among others. There is real craft here and real ambition.

But in a genre that is currently producing work as precise as The Ugly Stepsister and as unrelenting as The Substance, Thinestra does not quite make its impression. It has the right ingredients. It just needed a longer cook time.