Cody Parish
WARNING: This essay contains plot spoilers!
The killer’s point-of-view (POV) shot is arguably the most recognizable convention of the slasher film.1 Made famous in the opening sequence of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the killer’s lurking POV shot has been reproduced in countless subsequent slasher franchises as a means to build suspense. It is noticeably absent, however, from Shudder’s new independent release, In a Violent Nature (Chris Nash, 2024), a slasher movie whose central conceit entails taking the perspective of its killer.2 in her seminal monograph, Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992, 2015), Carol J. Clover was the first to challenge gendered arguments claiming male and female viewers of the slasher film identify with the male killer and Final Girl, respectively. Instead, Clover argues that viewers identify initially with the slasher killer until more details about the Final Girl are known, at which point viewer identification, prompted by cinematography as much as by narrative development, begins to shift to the Final Girl (45). Of the killer, Clover writes, “[He] is often unseen or barely glimpsed, during the first part of the film, and what we do see, when we finally get a good look, hardly invites immediate or conscious empathy,” noting the killer is typically “masked” or “deformed” (44).
Yet, what distinguishes In a Violent Nature from previous slashers exploring the killer’s perspective, like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), is that the film almost exclusively tracks the footsteps of its killer, Johnny (Ry Barrett), who becomes the narrative’s anti-hero as a result, while all other characters including the narrative’s Final Girl receive little backstory or development. The filmmakers strategically employ various cinematographic and narrative techniques to dehumanize and humanize Johnny as the de facto protagonist, oscillating between identificatory distance and proximity. Johnny explicitly embodies an ambivalent tension between revulsion and sympathy, one that has implicitly framed intellectually disabled slasher killers like Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974-2022) franchise and Jason Voorhees of the Friday the 13th (1980-2009) film series. In a Violent Nature thus challenges viewers to reconsider the dread of neurological difference connected to the killer in the slasher film.
Johnny – tracking shot and backlit
From the opening scene, the producers of In a Violent Nature go to great lengths to obscure the face of their killer, employing a range of formal filmmaking techniques to establish distance between Johnny and the viewers. Much of the runtime consists of medium, hip-level tracking shots of Johnny from behind, as he treks through the forest in search of the young adults who stole his mother’s locket. In most moments when Johnny is shot from the front, he is either backlit to cast his entire body in deep shadow or captured in a full shot with shallow focus to render his facial features indistinguishable. Other times, shots of Johnny are composed in such a way as to obscure his face with structural barriers like the support beam of a patio deck. These techniques collectively prevent viewers from identifying with Johnny, whose perspective is further alienated after he dons a vintage Vajen Bader firefighter helmet, which he has plundered, along with a hewing broad axe and drag hook, from a historical artifact display at the White Pines Ranger Station.
Upon leaving the station under the cover of night, Johnny triggers a motion-activated security light, and viewers receive their first glimpse of him from the front, his newfound helmet obscuring his face. This moment is telling, for it not only illustrates Clover’s aforementioned observation about the hidden identity of the slasher killer but also follows a genre precedent established by Carpenter’s Halloween and Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980) of inextricably linking the killer’s identity to their mask and the violence it comes to represent. Doing so obfuscates the slasher’s humanity, which, in the case of Michael Myers, is intentional because John Carpenter views Michael as a cosmic personification of evil.3 The same is true to an extent for Johnny in In a Violent Nature. The firefighter helmet masks Johnny’s face and so strips him of his humanity, shifting viewer identification away from him as a character. With his face now concealed, Johnny appears multiple times in a frontal view before, during, and after extreme moments of violence, the brutality of which only further alienates viewers. For example, after brutally killing Aurora on a scenic overlook, Johnny stands upright in a full shot and turns abruptly toward the camera, walking out of frame. Just before and during his confrontation with The Ranger at the White Pines station, Johnny appears in a medium profile shot and multiple other angles, connecting the extreme violence of this scene to Johnny’s identity, or, more specifically, to his mask. While it may be difficult for viewers to understand why a human would commit such violence, the actions of a masked, supernatural entity need no explanation.
Yet, despite the many ways the filmmakers obscure Johnny’s humanity to establish identificatory distance between his character and viewers, they employ just as many narrative techniques to reinforce his position as the character with which viewers most readily identify. Whereas the rationale for many slasher killers often has only a tenuous connection to their victims, Johnny’s motive for hunting down the young adults appears clear and, within the logic of the slasher narrative, justified: one of them steals his mother’s locket necklace, which, as viewers learn, was given to Johnny by his father; it is implied his mother died when he was young. The close connection between Johnny and his parents becomes more apparent when Ehren tells the story of the White Pines Slaughter. Johnny died 70 years ago at the White Pines logging camp where his father worked. Johnny had intellectual disabilities—Ehren describes him as a “slow kid” and “mentally hindered”—and played around the camp with his toy cars during the day. After a logger injured himself on one of Johnny’s toys, he tricked Johnny into climbing the nearby fire tower, from which Johnny fell to his death after being scared by another logger wearing a firefighter mask. Johnny’s body was left for his father to discover, the firefighter’s mask placed over Johnny’s head to create the appearance that he fell off the tower by accident while playing. When Johnny’s father confronted the loggers about his son’s suspicious death, they killed him in the ensuing fight, after which Johnny’s spirit returned to avenge his father and slaughter the entire camp.
As the story of his death and subsequent resurrection makes clear, Johnny was victimized for being neurodivergent, the horror of which draws viewer identification toward him. Johnny also cares deeply about his parents, who, it is implied, are the only people who showed him love while he was alive, an affective appeal that further prompts viewer sympathy. His violence, then, is imbued with his reciprocal love for his parents and his fidelity to protecting their memories.
This is why Johnny’s violence, at times, appears inflected with reactionary anger. When Johnny sees his mother’s locket dangling around Kris’s neck, he flings his hewing axe at her and briskly moves to retrieve it, quickening his stride in contrast to his prior plodding pace. When Troy complains that he does not want the news of Colt’s dead father to ruin his cabin experience, Johnny immediately triggers a car alarm to lure Troy out of the cabin, marches around the perimeter, and ambushes Troy from behind. Johnny’s angry outbursts betray his humanity and elicit sympathetic identification from discerning viewers.
The most significant moment in the film comes when viewers see Johnny’s unmasked face for the first time. This reveal clarifies Johnny’s humanity and buttresses sympathy for his character. Frustrated with Kris’s and Colt’s concern about Ehren’s disappearance, Troy throws the keys to their car into the forest, keys that include a toy car as a keychain. Johnny finds the keys first and becomes momentarily entranced by the car, sitting down behind a tree to play with the toy. As he rolls the car back and forth on his palm, a rack focus brings Johnny’s decomposed face into view. His grotesque visage is rendered childlike in the moment,4 as his play with the car keychain visually cues viewers to recall the story of the White Pines Slaughter, to remember that Johnny played with toy cars while alive, which led to his eventual death from the manipulation of disgruntled loggers. This moment of clarity demonstrates that Johnny cognitively experiences the world as a child while embodying the physique of an adult, his arrested development signifying an innocence at once begging for sympathy and simultaneously betrayed by the firefighter’s helmet laying nearby, its own symbol of Johnny’s transmogrification into a monster as a consequence of the violence wrought upon him and his father due to his neurodivergence and the violence he inflicts upon the world in return.
In a Violent Nature opens with a close-up of an empty window frame clinging to what viewers later learn are the remains of a fire tower, the one from which Johnny fell to his death. Johnny’s corpse lies beneath the ground of the dilapidated structure, his mother’s locket the only thing keeping his spirit at rest. A visual metaphor for the film’s central conceit, this opening shot challenges viewers to consider the familiar slasher narrative framed from a new perspective, the killer’s perspective—Johnny’s perspective. His perspective prompts revulsion and compassion, for Johnny explicitly embodies both violence and sympathy as the neurodivergent killer in a genre splattered with them.
In a Violent Nature makes no attempt to reconcile this tension. Indeed, its cinematography and narrative reinforce stereotypes of intellectually disabled characters long perpetuated by the slasher subgenre just as much as they challenge them, if not more so. Johnny exemplifies the sadistic brute stereotype foisted upon intellectually disabled slasher killers like Leatherface and Jason Voorhees: he wields superhuman strength with abandon, ripping apart anyone who stands between him and his mother’s heirloom no matter their intentions, or so it seems.
For his ferocity, Johnny is consistently compared to a non-human animal, specifically a bear, throughout the film, something that also serves to strip Johnny of his humanity. The filmmakers establish this narrative connection first when Johnny discovers the desiccated carcass of a bear caught in a trap. As Johnny continues his quest through the forest, viewers hear the voiceover of The Ranger chiding Chuck, a local resident, for laying traps around the forest. The Ranger foreshadows Johnny’s arrival, warning, “You stay out of that park, or one of these days, you’re going to find something that’s going to walk right through your traps. Trust me: you don’t want to find that animal.” Shortly thereafter, Johnny dismembers Chuck, fulfilling The Ranger’s threat and reinforcing his metaphorization as an unstoppable animal.
Ehren strengthens this narrative connection between Johnny and the nonhuman through the story of the White Pines Slaughter, concluding that the logging company dismissed the camp massacre as the result of an animal attack. In the final sequence of the film, The Woman rescues Kris and asks her what happened, to which Kris simply replies, “It was an animal.” The Woman then tells Kris the story of her brother surviving a bear attack, recalling him saying afterward, “Animals don’t get too hung up on reason.” This analogous event juxtaposes Johnny as the assailant with a bear plagued by henhouse syndrome—a bloodlust that leads the afflicted animal to kill a surplus of its prey without restraint, leaving the bodies behind uneaten. Collectively, these comparisons cast Johnny as a non-human animal whose actions need no explanation rather than a human subject whose perspective warrants consideration.
Refusing to relieve the previously constructed narrative tension, the filmmakers of In a Violent Nature betray Johnny’s reductive characterization in the final shot of the film, the camera panning slowly over the bear trap—an allusion to Johnny as a feral animal—to a gasoline canister on which Kris leaves the locket – its necklace gone. The shot implies that the locket has returned to Johnny’s possession and that Johnny has consequently returned to his resting place under the dilapidated fire tower. In doing so, the shot visually recalls Johnny’s motive, clarifying his violence as intentional rather than indiscriminate. It is this oscillating tension between identificatory distance and proximity, revulsion and sympathy, nonhuman and human, perception and reality, that perhaps best captures how neurodivergent characters exist in a neurotypical landscape. The dread of neurological difference looms large over In a Violent Nature, but this time viewers glimpse the human beneath the mask, if only for a moment—if only until the killing begins anew.
Notes
- I would like to thank Deka Spears and Kalli Root for their valuable feedback on an early draft of this essay. Their suggestions strengthened the cohesion of my argument, and I appreciate their support.
- The only POV shot of the film occurs in its final minute. In a nod to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Kris is rescued by a local resident passing by in her pickup truck. As the woman secures a tourniquet around Kris’s injured ankle, Kris stares into the surrounding forest, fearful that Johnny will reappear to finish killing her off. In the last frame of this penultimate scene, Kris is given a POV shot to intensify her paranoia for viewers.
- The role of Michael Myers in Carpenter’s Halloween is played by Nick Castle; however, Castle’s role is listed as The Shape in the film’s end credits. The nebulous name illustrates Carpenter’s insistence that Michael be understood as an inhuman, malevolent force.
- Johnny’s grotesque appearance follows a problematic history within the horror genre of utilizing physical deformity to signify a character’s disability and/or weakness. Travis Sutton writes, “[i]n earlier periods of human history, disabilities were often assumed to manifest some interior character flaw or corrupt soul” (74). In this case, associating Johnny’s intellectual disability with a physical deformity reinforces longstanding cultural connections between disability and moral corruption (88). Slasher villains including Leatherface, Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger all exemplify this harmful disability stereotype, and Johnny only perpetuates it even as his characterization and framing challenge viewers to look past his rotting face to recognize his humanity.
Works Cited
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. Directed by Scott Glosserman, Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2006.
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. 1992. Princeton UP, 2015.
Friday the 13th. Directed by Sean S. Cunningham, Paramount Pictures, 1980.
Halloween. Directed by John Carpenter, Compass International Pictures, 1978.
In a Violent Nature. Directed by Chris Nash, Shudder, 2024.
Sutton, Travis. “Avenging the Body: Disability in the Horror Film.” 2014. A Companion to the Horror Film, edited by Harry M. Benshoff, Wiley, 2017, pp. 73-89.
Cody Parish (he/him) is an educator and Program Director of the Chancellor’s Leadership Class and UCCSlead at University of Colorado Colorado Springs. He earned his master’s degree in English: Literary and Cultural Studies from Illinois State University. He has published essays on horror cinema and culture in Horror Homeroom and PopMatters and has a chapter in the edited collection The Cinema of James Wan: Critical Essays (2022). His research interests include horror studies, pop culture, and representations of children and young adults in media.
