What makes a good slasher? Is it the acting? The premise? The location? Maybe the kills?
This is a review full of questions.
It’s a lot to think about but you won’t have to with In A Violent Nature. This is a straightforward gut-ripping opus with enough sharp objects to fill a hardware store.
I remember the first time I watched the original Friday the 13th back in 1980. I wasn’t scared by the premise, I was shaken by the special effects. This was before VHS tapes, and I didn’t know how or when I would ever see it again, but I knew I had to. Savini’s work was amazing and I wanted to watch it again perhaps for clues on how he did it.
I got the same feeling from watching In A Violent Nature. Although not as groundbreaking as Friday the 13th it still conjures up anxiety especially when our killer picks up a new weapon foreshadowing the demise of another hapless young adult. How will he use it? How gory will it be? How original is the technique? See? A lot of questions. Thankfully in this film they are all answered in amazing ways.
If there was a doctorate in slasher movies Director Chris Nash must have two of them. His use of the archetypal husky mute killer in a mask is masterclass. He isn’t reinventing anything here, he’s honoring the genre by, ironically, not doing anything to change the idea. It’s like movie popcorn, the flavor is not in the pop it’s in the kernel.
In this case, the pop is our lumbering maniac and the kernels are the practical effects, cinematography, and POV. There’s an old inside meta joke that younger audiences might not get, but historically the slow-moving butchers in slasher movies seem to outrun their victims even though said killers never break a steady stride. It’s something integral to In A Violent Nature‘s pacing and somehow Nash fixes that cinematic continuity error by keeping things simple.
You can’t look at In A Violent Nature for its originality. The whole movie is a trope. But as a slasher, it might break the tolerance threshold for movie violence by bringing back the art of practical effects to audiences who haven’t hidden their eyes behind their hands for decades.
Ultimately isn’t that what we want in a good old-fashioned horror movie?
In A Violent Nature starts its theatrical run May 31 and will stream on Shudder sometime later.