At the centre of In a Violent Nature is a slow moving, mould riddled man bought back from the dead and stumbling around but for once it’s not Joe Biden on the campaign trail but a man called ‘Johnny’. Long dead he is bought back to life slowly emerging from his forest grave to reclaim a pendant necklace. Starting with a lengthy static shot Johnny emerges from the earth and silently but determinedly tramps through the forest and we follow him like some sort of third person player on a games console. It’s all very low key and bizarrely soothing as we follow behind him never seeing his face and hearing conversations in the distance from potential victims. It’s a technique that goes right against the usual horror tropes of fast tense set pieces and yet here it works quite brilliantly.
So whilst Johnny is after the necklace that has kept him underground we get to meet a group of five campers who are clearly going to be future victims, sitting around a camp fire as one recounts the legend of the local logging town and the death of a boy and the vengeance visited upon those responsible for his death. That boy is Johnny and he is back armed with the appropriate logging tools and doles out death in the most astonishing on screen deaths you’re likely to see on screen this year.
Director Chris Nash has stripped this right back to basics and the film makes nods to those notorious video nasties that were banned in the UK under the Video Recordings Act 1983 with some exceptionally gruesome deaths and one in particular is as imaginative as it is horrific and unlike any horror death we’ve ever seen. That a park ranger who arrives part way through comments that this is not the first time this has happened suggests that the success of In A Violent Nature could quite easily prompt a prequel and even a franchise.
In a Violent Nature is a throwback to those gnarly 1970’s horrors even using a 4 x 3 framing and the Johnny’s pacing methodically through the forest is hypnotic in its deliberate pacing spiked with shocking deaths making this one of the years must see horror films.
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Here’s the In a Violent Nature trailer……
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