Canadian filmmaker Chris Nash’s 2024 In a Violent Nature is an effective, pared-down slasher. It is also a commentary – and at times a rather brilliant one – on the slasher.
The killer’s perspective . . .
Ever since Vera Dika’s and Carol Clover’s work in the 1980s and early 1990s, it has been commonplace to talk about the way that slashers take the point of view of the killer. Dika writes about the slasher’s distinctive “moving camera point-of-view shot,” which allows for identification “with the killer’s look” (88), and Clover mentions the slasher’s “I-camera [used] to represent the killer’s point of view” (45). Slashers that famously deploy this I-camera include Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974), Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), and Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980). (In the early 1980s, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert offered a famous polemic against exactly this characteristic of the slasher.) In a Violent Nature made me realize, however, how limited this claim actually is.
Unlike its famous slasher predecessors, In a Violent Nature is a film that – for large sections of its running time – fully takes the perspective of the killer (Ry Barrett). And, by this, I don’t mean that the camera adopts his point of view, because it mostly does not. The camera, for most of the film, centers the killer but it follows behind him. What I would say is the signature of this film – that which is distinctive about it – is precisely those scenes in which the camera trails just behind the killer (most of his body in the shot) as he walks through the woods. And the killer spends a lot of time walking through the woods – just walking through the woods – as the camera (and we) follow behind.
In a characteristic scene, the camera follows the killer
Much more so than the fleeting “I-camera” shots from the killer’s point of view in Halloween and Friday the 13th, these scenes shift the entire focus of the film (visual and narrative) away from the group of young people (the victims). In doing so, In a Violent Nature makes the viewer aware of the degree to which, in typical slasher films from the early 1970s until now, the focus is actually on the victims – the extent to which the film is theirs, despite the commonplace that the slasher frequently aligns the camera (and thus the viewer) with the killer.
The young people of In a Violent Nature are very far from being positioned at the center. Indeed, they come into view, become present, only as the killer sees and hears them. He is at the center, and they are more often than not on the edges of the frame: we hear them speak without being able to see them; they move into the periphery of the camera’s vision, conversations already ongoing, some of what they’re saying indiscernible; their bodies, words, and conversations are fragmented and incomplete. The only part of the first two-thirds or so of the film that potentially serves as an exception to this rule is a scene around the camp fire relatively early in the film – a scene that goes on for several minutes and that serves to introduces the young people, their relationships with each other, and the mythology of the “White Pine Slaughter.” This scene works with the visual and narrative logic of the film, however, because the killer is in the woods, watching, so, even here, we are watching, listening, from his perspective. Other than this scene, though, the young characters, the victims are always on the margins, are caught only in fragments, from the killer’s ambulatory and central perspective.
The victims enter the frame dominated by the killer’s perspective
The young people do move to the center when they are killed, when they are reduced to their bodies, the insides literally coming outside revealing the illusion of their selfhood (and selfhood in general). The infamous yoga scene, with its disassembling and reassembling of a body is only one case in point. The centrality of the victims as only dead flesh is yet another way in which the killer’s perspective is centered, since that is how he sees them. Their humanity is violently erased not only in their deaths but before, in his view of them, which makes his killing of them inevitable. He walks, implacably, around the forest and reduces them to what they already are to him – to how he already sees them. Their humanity – their unique individuality – is as flickering and marginal to him as the ways in which they visually enter the frame.
The Final Girl . . .
The most significant change to In a Violent Nature’s centering of the killer’s perspective (evident most obviously in the distinctive scenes of his walking through the forest, trailed by the camera), occurs in the last third when Kris (Andrea Pavlovic) – the Final Girl – is fleeing through the woods and the camera begins to follow her instead. Other than the thudding that signals the killer’s destruction of his last victim (Colt) – thudding that goes on far longer and penetrates much further than it seems it should – the killer is actually gone from the film at this point, at the point that the focus shifts to Kris. This conforms to what typically happens at the end of the slasher, as ably articulated by Clover: “Our closeness to [the killer] wanes as our closeness to the Final Girl waxes – a shift underwritten by story line as well as camera position: By the end, point of view is hers.” And, with the Final Girl, “we become if not the killer of the killer then the agent of his expulsion from the narrative vision” (45). In Nash’s film, once we shift to Kris at the center of the frame, we don’t go back. The killer’s body is indeed expelled. But his perspective, embedded in and with the woods, has been so central to the film that it is not so easily dispelled.
The focus shifts to Kris in the last 20 minutes or so, as she flees the killer and the woods
The killer’s violent nature . . .
Along with its radical centering of the killer through much of its run-time, In a Violent Nature provocatively interrogates the killer’s nature – something evoked in the film’s title: the killer both has and inhabits “a violent nature.” The slasher has a long tradition of dehumanizing the killer, as both Clover and Dika have pointed out; as Clover puts it, slasher killers “may be recognizably human, but they are only marginally so, just as they are only marginally visible” (30). In a Violent Nature, on the other hand, renders the killer eminently visible – and it also puts his nature and his ‘humanity’ equally front and center.
On the one hand, both the killer’s animal violence in In a Violent Nature, as well as his alignment with the woods, work to dehumanize him. In a Violent Nature takes the slasher’s propensity to dehumanize the killer to its extreme, suggesting a killer who is barely human at all, a killer aligned instead with the woods and with the animals that inhabit it. The long scenes of the killer’s walking through the woods and sitting in the woods, render him visually a part of the woods. So, when In a Violent Nature centers the killer’s perspective, it is also centering an ambiguously nonhuman perspective. The killer is not just “marginally” human as Clover has argued (30), a claim that implies an attenuation of an intrinsic humanity; he is rendered as almost fully nonhuman. Part of the radicalness of In a Violent Nature, then, is because it offers an almost totalizing nonhuman perspective.
In a Violent Nature is body horror told from the perspective of the body.
This impetus of the film – its centering of a nonhuman perspective – is amplified at the end when Kris is picked up by a woman in a truck, who tells a long story about her brother Bobby – a forest ranger – being mauled by a bear. She is prompted to tell this story because when she asks Kris what happened to her in the woods, Kris responds only: “It was an animal.”
When Kris hears the story of Bobby, she asks the woman why the bear left him alive, why the bear didn’t eat him. The woman talks of “henhouse syndrome,” in which predator animals “just keep killing everything around them. They don’t go back for food or anything. They just keep killing. No reason at all. Animals,” she concludes, “don’t get too hung up on reason.” This story obviously aligns the bear with the killer Kris has just encountered, thus affirming his irrational and violent “nature.”
But the film actually offers another view – posing both for the viewer to consider. In a Violent Nature gives its killer, from the beginning, a name (Johnny), as well as a distinct precipitating cause for his violence. He is thus also rendered as a quite human killer.
Like many slasher killers, Johnny was tormented by others – tricked up into a fire tower and then scared so much he fell to his death. (This is specifically like the opening of 1980’s Prom Night, in which a child is bullied and falls from the upper floor of a building to her death.) Johnny is also defined, then, not only by the woods and animals, with which he often seems aligned, but by two human artifacts: his mother’s locket and a red toy car, signaling his childhood, his grief, and his loss. In these ways, then, In a Violent Nature distinguishes Johnny from the nature around him and shows his own violent nature to be a quite human creation – the result of torment and bullying. Johnny’s violent rampage in the film is bookended by Troy’s taking his mother’s locket and Kris’s putting it back.
The ending is ambiguous then: does an irrational and violent nature – signified by “henhouse syndrome” – wait patiently to destroy those who encounter it? That is certainly one affective response to the ending of the film, in which Kris gazes with anticipatory terror into the woods.
Kris watches the woods nervously at the end – but the woman who picked her up is also in the frame
Or is violence activated by other humans, by the things we do to each other? This too is a lingering source of dread throughout the film’s ending after the unnamed woman picks Kris up in her truck. Is she to be trusted? Is she, not the woods, not “nature,” the threat? Slasher fans will certainly be wary of the woman, remembering the fate of Annie in Friday the 13th, who made the mistake of accepting a ride from Mrs. Voorhees. Or the fate of Parker (Gideon Adlon), who barely survives being picked up and “rescued” by her would-be killer in the recent slasher, Sick (John Hyamns, 2022).
There is no final emergence of the killer in In a Violent Nature – no Jason surging from the water. But the viewer sits, with Kris, staring in terror at the woods, feeling only dread about the woods, about her seeming rescuer. Where is the threat? The film suggests that it could lie in nature or humans – or both.
References
Clover, Carol. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, 1992.
Dika, Vera. “The Stalker Film, 1978-81.” In American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, edited by Gregory A. Waller, 86-101. University of Illinois Press, 1987.
