Johnathan Walker:Here's Johnny! Buzzy slasher movie 'In a Violent Nature' unleashes a gory kill to die for

Tired of the same old slasher movie?Johnathan Walker Well, the latest one offers a seriously killer new perspective.

The indie horror film “In a Violent Nature” (in theaters now and streaming on Shudder later this year) features a group of young people being hunted in the forest by a masked murderer returned from the dead. The intriguing rub here: The chiller flips the usual script and primarily takes the point of view of the big scary menace.

The attention that "Violent Nature" has been getting since premiering in January at Sundance Film Festival has been “pretty overwhelming,” Canadian writer/director Chris Nash reports. “We really thought we were just going to make something small that hit under the radar and maybe got on a few horror movie blogs.” A similarly buzzy scary movie, 2023's "Talk to Me," was a Sundance favorite that ended up a summertime hit.

Join our Watch Party!Sign up to receive USA TODAY's movie and TV recommendations right in your inbox

Nash's film mythology centers on a legend about a boy named Johnny, who was tricked 70 years ago by drunk loggers to climb to the top of a fire tower. One of them, wearing an old firefighter's mask, scared him so bad he fell off, broke his neck and died.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

According to lore, Johnny has returned again and again as a massive supernatural giant (played by Ry Barrett) who slaughters unsuspecting victims. The thing that keeps him at bay is his mother's locket hanging over his grave at what's left of the tower. But Johnny's eternal rest is disturbed this time by a random dude who takes the necklace, not knowing the terror he's unleashed, and the audience follows Johnny silently trudging his way through the wilderness on a gory quest to get it back.

“We always wanted to treat this almost like a nature documentary. It's lulling you into a sense (that) the danger isn't quite there,” Nash says. “When you see tourists getting really close to bears, they're just like, ‘Oh, no, look, it's not doing anything. It's fine.’ And then all of a sudden, the bear just turns around and charges at you. You're way too defenseless and you just have no idea that they're capable of this much power and brutality.

“Not to besmirch bears, they're great, but (we wanted) that kind of design with Johnny, of being an animal in the woods.”

The movie is set in Northern Ontario where Nash grew up. The location inspired Johnny’s iconography – his firefighter’s mask, drag hooks and hewing ax reflect not only his tragic backstory but also the area’s forestry industry – while the methodical camera work that watches Johnny go about his nasty business was influenced by early 2000s Gus Van Sant films including “Gerry,” “Elephant” and “Last Days.” 

That’s pretty artsy for a character joining the villainous canon of Jason, Freddy and Michael. Because he's using the slasher tropes as tools to freshen up a tired but beloved subgenre, Nash figures that “Violent Nature” will be “very divisive amongst horror fans,” which is why he knew “we have to have great kills" for even the haters to love. "Just some sort of grandiose element to hitch our wagon to.”

He doesn’t disappoint. In addition to some head-crushing and body-slicing action, “Violent Nature” features the most epically gnarly moment that gore hounds will see on screen all year. It involves a young woman just trying to do some yoga, Johnny’s signature hooks and her head being pulled through a body cavity where it really shouldn’t be.

“Once you learn certain magic tricks, they're just not that much fun anymore. We didn't want a whole bunch of throat slashes or anything like that,” says Nash, a lifelong horror fan (“I was definitely the kid in high school with the ‘Fangoria’ posters in their locker that kept all the girls away"). The yoga kill “was motivated by trying to challenge myself,” he adds. “I always want to see things that I haven't seen before on screen. So it's a selfish thing just to see if like, oh, man, I wonder if we can actually make this work?”

Even though Nash puts a refreshing spin on a familiar mythology, he feels “it still follows complete slasher rules”: Johnny isn’t the protagonist but “just our entry point into this story” and there is a final girl. But Nash ultimately ditched his original climactic finale for a quieter ending: “If we just did the same old slasher faceoff, as much as I feel audiences will want that and are expecting it, the audience of me has seen that before.”

Now Nash is even thinking "Violent Nature" sequel and “what could we do to be different but keep the same spirit of experimentation?”

“Maybe it's a necessity with horror in general, where you’ve got to keep building that scaffold up,” Nash says of adding new wrinkles to the classic slasher. “We’ve got to see how high we can get with this tower until God strikes us down.”