In a Violent Nature is going to be a very trying movie by design. Its entirety follows its very Jason-esque supernatural killer in near real-time as he goes through the woods and eventually kills several unlucky locals and partying teenagers. That means it’s several long sequences of watching the back of this hulking zombie killer walk through the woods and eventually get closer to victims. The actual kill scenes have some impressively nauseating gore, which might serve as a reward to the audience for enduring the lengthy walking. Seriously, this guy perambulates like a boss. He walks. And walks. And walks. Occasionally, he’ll kill someone in  gruesome fashion, but most of his journey, and by extension the movie’s journey, is tagging along on his extensive nature hike. Is that going to be interesting to the average horror fan? Probably not. It’s designed to wear down your patience. The filmmakers clearly understand what effect their creative choices would have, and they went through with them anyway. It’s not like writer/director Chris Nash is lacking in style. His segment in 2014’s The ABCs of Death 2, “Z for Zygote,” is ingeniously horrifying. There is a great moment here where our killer’s hand is reaching toward the screaming face of his soon-to-be victim and then Nash performs a match cut with the same hand, now dripping with blood, reaching out for a desired necklace moments later. It’s quick and also subversive, denying the viewer our first opportunity at onscreen violence. This is a movie that works primarily in the realm of denying its target audience what it wants, and that is kind of fascinating to me. I don’t know if it’s enough to make me declare In a Violent Nature as good, but this movie seems destined to work on a different level than good/bad.

And yet, the movie invites a deeper contemplation through its very experimental nature. We’re walking side-by-side with this undead specter as he tromps through the woods looking to reclaim his special token, and it’s boring by design. I hate using that as an excuse because the movie does get rather tedious at parts, and yet it challenged me to engage more with the movie on an intellectual level, to examine its deliberate creative choices. Just about every slasher movie is designed around the clockwork killing of its easily disposable characters, usually dumb teenagers, by some powerful malevolent force. However, just about every slasher I can recall places the viewer in the perspective of the dumb teenagers engaging in dumb teenager antics, usually drinking and trying to engage in premarital sex. Let’s not pretend those characters are generally any more nuanced or well written than the villain stalking them. Instead of spending all our time with these character archetypes and the occasional pop-in from the villain, it’s reversed. It’s the dumb teenagers that pop-in while we’re on the journey with the slasher fiend. Does it make the kills hit harder because of the long stretches leading up to them because we see how many close calls there have been? Because this guy is trying his best? I don’t know, but the cries of In a Violent Nature being unbearably tedious makes me reflect on whether tedium is, by nature, part of the slasher genre, and perhaps we’ve all ignored the formula because of regular intervals of blood and boobs. Are dumb teenagers that much better company than a silent brute going for a walk?

It was around the halfway point where I began to question whether this approach was causing me to develop empathy for our supernatural killing machine. The back-story is tragic, being a young child tricked by kids he thought were his friends, only to plunge to his death from a water tower. Children can be cruel, and if this was one’s ever-lasting memory of human interaction, then I would understand coming back as a murderous revenant. He also didn’t ask to be brought back to life. The dumb teenagers stole his mother’s necklace and his goal is to simply reclaim it. Yes, he’ll kill plenty of people that had nothing to do with bringing him back, collateral damage from messing with forces that humans should never mess with. He’s just on the hunt for his dear departed mother’s keepsake. In essence, he is looking for the item to return back to the land of the dead, to end being pulled back into corporeal existence. When you look at that context, every dead teenager becomes one step closer to finding that necklace and going back to his eternal slumber. Perhaps our big bad is suffering and looking for that pain to cease. When you’re quite literally walking beside this figure for the duration of the movie, it sparks a personal reflection whether you may be unexpectedly developing empathy. Is it simply projection and all proximal, spending all this time with only one character? Is this a human byproduct of wanting to imbue emotional depth to characters for our sense of engagement? I cannot say. When you walk a mile, or more accurately several, in another (dead) man’s shoes, maybe you start to see the world in his weary, irritable perspective and want that big nap back.

I have no idea how each viewer will respond to In a Violent Nature. I was wrestling with different mixed feelings, including boredom. I don’t think traditional fans of traditional horror will find the long slog worth taking its time to smell the proverbial flowers. I imagine most will grow restless, antsy, and maybe even angry, and that response is entirely valid and understandable. The novelty of watching the killer stalk his future victims in real time can be one of those ideas that, upon execution, feels better as a short film than as a feature experiment. I admire the gusto of embracing this approach and flipping the slasher script into what amounts to an unorthodox nature documentary between predator and prey. It’s an interesting approach that invites ongoing textual analysis with the genre, the depiction of the characters and their tired archetypes, as well as what makes these movies worth our time and passing investment. Likely there will be more people that shrug and deem In a Violent Nature a dull bore, but I’m also positive there will be people who find themselves unexpectedly thinking and feeling things they didn’t anticipate. Ultimately, it’s a movie I can begrudgingly admire more than engage with, but I appreciate taking the familiar and presenting it in a way we’ve seldom witnessed before.

Nate’s Grade: C+