After debuting at the Sundance Film Festival in the Midnight section, Chris Nash’s slasher film In a Violent Nature immediately became one of the most buzzed-about horror movies of the year. A clever subversion of the tropes of the genre shot primarily from the killer’s perspective, this is a slow-paced but incredibly eerie horror picture with some absolutely epic kill scenes.
We at FandomWire got to discuss In a Violent Nature with Nash, taking a deep dive into the film’s… execution…
In a Violent Nature Interview
FandomWire: I mean this as a huge compliment, but I think In a Violent Nature may be one of the cruelest films I’ve seen outside European extremist cinema. What made you want to approach these characters’ deaths with such brutality?
Chris Nash: Wow. I don’t consider it brutal — I just never did. I have a background in prosthetic effects design, so for me, it’s all just technical challenges. I guess it’s an effect of the more brutal you get, the more technically challenging it’s going to be.
Me and Steve Kostanski, the lead prosthetics designer on this — who also is a director; we go back and forth working on each other’s films; right now, I’m working on his Deathstalker remake — we’re always trying to challenge ourselves technically as far as seeing some things that we haven’t really seen before.
So a lot of them were just issues where we were like, “We kind of want to see something we haven’t done before, and we want to build something we haven’t built before.” And I guess it just gets nastier and nastier the more you think that way as a consequence. — Chris Nash
FW: In a Violent Nature is being released unrated, and it’s pretty rare for an unrated film to get this big of a theatrical push. What do you think are the challenges and rewards of subverting the MPA system like this?
Nash: Personally, I can’t see any pluses. It’s just another burden to deal with. I mean, there’s obviously the attraction to that within the genre of fans feeling like, “We’re gonna watch something that’s unrated, so it’s going to show us something we haven’t seen before.” But I don’t know. I feel like the world’s unfortunately a little too cynical, where they’ll also see this and just be like, “Ah, they probably just didn’t even want to get it rated. It’s probably tame as hell.”
FW: Well, I think there’s something to be said in the film about society’s fascination with violence — both in terms of the characters being obsessed with the story of this serial killer and the fact that a lot of audiences will be coming to see this for the buzz-worthy kill scenes. Why do you think people tend to be intrigued by the macabre like this?
Nash: I don’t know. It might be just a fascination with mortality. And even though there is a sinister aspect to the resurrection of some kind of a slasher entity that does, in some deep-seated way, also tell you that their things might not end when they end. So there could be comfort in that.
I think a lot of people want answers spiritually to things, and entering into these more like supernatural frameworks at least gives them some sort of clue as to what’s happening internally. Also, there’s just the escapism of it, where you do want to feel like you’re living in a world where more things are possible, even if it leads to you getting your head chopped off with an axe.
FW: Something else I found really intriguing about In a Violent Nature is its partial lore. We see flashbacks and hear exposition like in the campfire story, but you also allow audiences to fill in many of the gaps regarding Johnny’s backstory. Why do you think this makes the movie scarier and more interesting?
Nash: That’s very interesting. I don’t consider him to be a scary character, and maybe that’s because I’m too close to it. I look at him as much more robotic, and he just has programming into him.
FW: I think there can be something scary about roboticness, too, though. If we’re looking at classic horror icons, Michael Myers is a killing machine, and one of the scariest characters there is.
Nash: There is that sense of uncanny for sure that does put you in a state of unease. If that is happening, I think it comes from the fact that when you fill it in yourself, you are putting parts of yourself into that story, regardless of whether you think you are or not. It does create a sense of a lived-in world where your own experiences are adding to the story so that story is a part of you, that story is real in some way.
I love the idea of in film, like the campfire scene and the ending coda of the film, where characters are telling stories to each other for some reason. When characters are telling stories to each other, whether it’s in a film or in a book, where it’s nested tales, it gives so much more credibility to what’s happening, and you feel like, “What I’m reading or what I’m seeing, that’s not fake,” the story being told feels more real. And I think that it probably is just through you having to fill in all the background elements and all the interconnected tissue yourself. – Chris Nash
FW: I think In a Violent Nature really hinges on Ry Barrett’s performance, too. On one hand, it’s incredibly physical, but he also conveys a lot of emotion through his mannerisms. Do you want to talk a bit about how you worked with him to bring the character of Johnny to life?
Nash: We were together beforehand, just talking through the movements and even rehearsing the walk when he was in costume. A lot of the film is just watching our slasher going from point A to point B and existing in an environment to lull the audience into this sense of safety. But that walk is very, very important.
So we worked together on that, figuring out where his weight should be held in his body as he’s moving and even just his shoulders. But a lot of it, he did bring to set on the first day. He told us afterward that he was actually watching a lot of nature videos and animal attack videos just to see a bear is very, very calm, and then all of a sudden, in an instant, it’s just like a weapon — a killing machine. And when he told us that, we were like, “Oh, yeah, we can totally see that in your performance now; we just never clued into it.”
But because he brought a lot to it, and because he was embodying the character and riding that line so perfectly of somebody that we could imbue emotional reasoning onto, but at the same time, is that automaton most of the direction was actually just like slower or faster. “Pick up that axe just a tiny bit slower,” or “a little bit quicker,” because I’m keeping the tempo of the scene in my head and having that metronome play.
And a lot of the time, that metronome was actually his own footsteps. Just how quickly Ry would be walking would dictate the pace of the film in general, which was one of the things we didn’t learn until we were shooting it. And when we got in the editing bay, we were like, “Oh, this is incredibly interesting how this works.”
FW: My favorite scene in In a Violent Nature, and probably many people’s, is the scene with the drag hooks. How did you pull that scene off?
Nash: How do you pull it off? Well, because of my background in prosthetics. I’m always writing things. When I’m writing an effect, I’m also writing it with the directing it in my head. And I never want to do anything that I know I can’t at least conceptually pull off. So even with that one, technically, I’m kind of seeing as it’s writing, “Okay, what could I do? What angle can I shoot this from? Could I shoot this from this point of view or this perspective or this type to convey the series of moments that build into this one huge, gory set piece?”
So, all of that is always in the front of my mind as I’m writing. Challenging yourself, but at the same time working through as you’re writing it, how you’re going to pull it off because otherwise, we’re just talking about building flying cars. – Chris Nash
In a Violent Nature hits theaters on May 31.
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