Flasz On Film

Playing with some genres is like cooking, and some other genres are like baking. With “cooking” genres, there is a degree of freedom afforded by the recipe and the chef has some latitude to improvise, innovate and depart from the original recipe without abandoning the integrity of the dish or risking the final product not coming together at all. You know, just as you can add rosemary to your bolognese just to see what happens or maybe substitute a Polish smoked sausage for chorizo and nduja in a hunter’s stew to give it a bit of a zing, you can mess with some genres more freely and still put together an edible product. Comedies are like cooking. Action movies are, too. Film noir, to an extent, although it requires a chef who knows which elements form the base of the recipe and where they have that space to make choices, so as to assure the end product can still be referred to as “film noir” as opposed to anything else.

Meanwhile horror is a “baking” genre. Well, that’s probably not entirely correct because the horror is an umbrella term under which many distinct subgenres can be found. To confuse you a bit further, horror is a bit like the music genre of metal. There isn’t a band who just play “metal” or whose style can be described as such, but rather a more specific, oftentimes sophisticated, designation can be found to describe the band’s music. Just as there’s speed metal, power metal, death metal (subcategorized further into melodic death metal, technical death metal etc.), thrash metal and more, there’s a whole slew of subcategories within the horror genre and those subgenres tend to be of the “baking” kind. And with “baking” genres, the chef must follow the recipe much more closely to emerge with an edible product. Any substitutions or innovations must come out of deep understanding of the form, just as playing with ingredients and ratios within the confines of a cake recipe must reflect the chef’s underlying knowledge of the chemistry these ingredients are supposed to engage in. It’s a game of high stakes because any deviations from the template of, say, the canonical slasher horror run a serious risk of the end product coming out of the oven unrisen, flat, inedible and perhaps even unsafe to consume.

However, it’s not impossible to innovate within this format either. Tucker and Dale vs Evil successfully folded a comedic flavour into the slasher horror dough. Edgar Wright is particularly known for his “chefy” artistry within the horror genre with his takes on the zombie horror (Shaun of the Dead) or giallo (Last Night in Soho), as is James Wan whose movies such as The Conjuring, Insidious or Malignant effortlessly mixed, matched and meshed within subgenres. It just goes to show that baking isn’t necessarily an arcane art inaccessible to many, but rather that it takes incredible skill, talent and perspective to come up with a novel or fresh recipe within any subcategory of horror.

The barrier to entry to becoming a cook capable of freely innovating within a “cooking” genre with appreciable effect is significantly lower than it is for “baking” genres. It takes a real chef to bake something truly new.

And the question I’m about to pose is if Chris Nash, who wrote and directed In a Violent Nature, can be considered an inspired pastry chef capable of discovering new recipes within the subgenre of slasher horror. Upon first glance, it would certainly look that way because his debut feature (Nash had directed a segment in ABCs of Death 2 before in addition to a number of short films) immediately distinguishes itself stylistically and conceptually from the crowded space of other slashers. Nash’s camera is often perched on a tripod, the filmmaker consciously holds on still images for considerable amounts of time and he often stages shots so that a skilled slasher-watcher would expect items of import to emerge from the blurred negative space for added effect.

In addition, In a Violent Nature immediately suggests to the viewer that the movie is going to take them on a bit of a different journey than they might otherwise expect. In the opening scene, we witness a locket being taken from a location in the woods by a group of characters, whom by the way we only hear. After they depart on their merry way, we witness a sinister-looking figure emerge from underground, which also allows the viewer to correctly identify the template of the movie as a slasher. However, instead of following those poor sods who had the audacity to awaken some kind of a demon killer, we get to hang out with someone who looks like a power-walking Jason Voorhees-type.

So, we watch him walk and walk and walk, which is also where the filmmaker adds to the gimmick of observing a slasher movie from the point of view of the killer (we don’t see the world through his eyes as in Maniac but rather follow him as though he was the protagonist for a long while), because that hulking murderous entity behaves a bit like an apex predator. He roams seemingly aimlessly, patrolling his perimeter, propelled by a mission to retrieve that locket and only homes in on his victims when they cross his path. Like a panther, he changes direction when he detects the scent of prey and we get to have a front row seat to what we’d otherwise witness from the point of view of an unsuspecting victim. Without a pause, a word or even a thought, the killer comes upon his victims, dispatches them in appropriately gruesome ways and just moves on along, while Nash’s camera captures it all stoically as though it was a nature documentary.

However, the filmmaker eventually reveals that he isn’t necessarily interested in reinventing the slasher formula or elevating it in any appreciable way, which I think would have been a much bolder choice on his behalf, and instead he lets us know that indeed we are following a Jason Voorhees-type and that his power-walking and ruthless killing aren’t incidental either. The killer’s name is Johnny (Ry Barrett) and we learn about his backstory when the filmmaker brings him up close to a group of college-aged young adults sitting around a campfire telling each other spooky stories. And his story is one you’d probably recognize, while also noting it firmly binds him to the slasher template… which you’re observing from a point of view you might (and perhaps should) find refreshing.

This is where I make a brief return to my culinary analogy and perhaps answer my own question, because the moment we are certain we are watching a slasher film in which we observe staple scenes and scenarios any genre hound would immediately identify from the perspective of a power-walking villain—a de facto Friday the 13^th Part II through the eyes of Jason Voorhees—we know we are on familiar ground. We see Johnny find a mask and a set of murder weapons which will come to define his character and then we all know the territory we are in. Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature isn’t a reinvention of the slasher recipe, nor its successful gourmet deconstruction with a gold leaf on top and cranberry reduction smeared on the side of the plate. Neither is it a fusion twist on the genre Tucker and Dale vs Evil was some years back. It’s an upside-down cake, a well-known recipe, but one which perhaps hasn’t been applied within the context of a slasher horror yet… at least to my understanding.

When it comes to an upside-down cake, the chemistry and the science underpinning its preparation are well described and they can be logically deduced, as they are not too dissimilar from a regular downside-down cake. A caramel-based sauce goes on the bottom of the tin, some fruit lines the bottom submerged in the sauce and the batter—flour, milk, eggs, the works—is poured on top. The whole thing goes into the oven and bakes upside down. Voila! Looks revolutionary. However, the key clue is in the name—upside-down cake—and once the cake leaves the oven and cools down, the tin is flipped upside down to reveal… well… a cake. It looks like a cake. It tastes like one. But it was prepared out of order and baked upside down, so in effect it is a cake with a gimmick which produces a rather delicious and oftentimes resplendent cake. But it’s still a cake.

Which is what In a Violent Nature is. A cake. No. A slasher. A topsy-turvy slasher cake baked upside down and assembled out of whack, flipped on its head towards the end and served as a whole as a delicious and supple product of its genre. Conceptually, structurally, narratively and for the most part aesthetically, this movie is still a slasher which fits very well within the parameters of its template. It only goes to show that the filmmakers had intimate knowledge of which buttons to press, what to lean on, where to build suspense and where to indulge in the viscera and gore, as the movie is a stupendously effective genre piece with a refreshing twist because in the world of slasher cakes, an upside-down one is a rarity. And I am going out on a limb here to suggest it may be the first of its kind (as I’m counting Maniac as a representative of a wholly different subcategory of slasher gimmicks), which all adds up to my admission I liked this movie a whole lot.

Between the frequently relentless stillness of the camera, the idea to follow the hulking killer who seems appropriately indestructible (as per requirements of the subgenre) and the overall brevity of the picture, In a Violent Nature is a great example of something fresh composed from extremely familiar ingredients. This isn’t an elevated piece of genre storytelling disguising a psychological conversation in slasher garb (like Scott Cooper’s Antlers and the like), but rather a good old-fashioned slasher which follows the recipe to the letter, and whose freshness comes from the fact that the recipe it executes is appropriately tweaked. Yet it is still predominantly familiar.

Therefore, you will get mad at some of the victims and their braindead choices. You will roll your eyes at decisions you know will lead to terrible consequences. You will see people have their guts taken out against their will. You will witness dismemberment and gore and deployment of industrial tools in a way which would make safety inspectors shudder in terror. Because it’s all a part of the game and the experience of watching a slasher. But it will be mostly deployed in a way you should consider refreshing because not every filmmaker would hang so tightly to the villain’s shoulder for so long.

However, what I find quite a bit interesting (and what I can only surmise may be a bone of contention for others) is that In a Violent Nature doesn’t commit fully to its upside-down cake, just as an upside-down cake is a dish which is never served upside down. It’s supposed to be baked in a weird way and served conventionally, which is what this movie does, because towards the end the filmmakers make a key decision to shift the perspective and have the viewer jump from the villain’s shoulder to follow his would-be victim as she makes a run for it through the thick woods of Ontario, Canada. Injured and scared out of her wits, Kris (Andrea Pavlovic) finds her way to a road and gets picked up by a random stranger. By the way, this random stranger is played by Lauren-Marie Taylor who had a role in Friday the 13^th Part II, so that’s an Easter Egg you should find entertaining and informative of the filmmaker’s intentions. What follows is a long drive and a conversation where the viewer is supposed to expect the killer to emerge out of nowhere and stage that one last hurrah and just about barely miss the final girl with his murder weapon like Leatherface in the 1974 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But Chris Nash chooses not to indulge. We don’t see Kris laugh hysterically while driving away in the back of a pickup truck and neither do we see Johnny dance with his hooks against the dying embers of the setting sun. The payoff never comes, which perhaps indicates that Chris Nash isn’t merely applying an upside-down cake recipe to the slasher template and that he has the proverbial balls to upset the status quo without risking the cake’s integrity at a time and place where it matters.

All in all, I can only recommend In a Violent Nature to any aficionado of the genre who thinks they’re ready to embrace a bit of freshness in the subgenre of slasher horror. It confidently applies tried-and-true ideas in ways you may not have seen before, all of which add up to something inherently familiar. However, the combination of the movie’s brevity (just around ninety minutes start to finish) and the filmmaker’s decisions to embrace longer takes and relentlessly oppress the viewer by stretching the band of suspense way past its limitations are what sets this movie apart from the crowd of clones of movies we all know and love, like Halloween and others.

And I can only imagine that Johnny will make an appearance once more. After all, it is a genre staple for the killer to come back in a sequel and the character is prominent and memorable enough to warrant a good comeback. Though, I wonder whether Chris Nash will commit to an upside-down cake once more, or if he’d find a different recipe to apply to the slasher template. Or maybe, just maybe, he’ll feel empowered by this film’s incredible prowess to seek out something even riskier and perhaps In a Violent Nature 2 will come to redefine the slasher horror properly. Time will tell.