Horror is the only genre that embraces the fleeting mortality of its subjects. Betwixt the bed-rotted doomscroller’s reel of Mr. Incredible descending into mad schizophrenic theories on what lies outside the known universe, or the ancient peoples who endowed their constellations with godhood, there is a primal allure to an outsideness our species must commune with by whatever means necessary. In A Violent Nature shapes itself entirely around an entity of this outsideness—Johnny, (Ry Barrett) manifestly pursuing its subjects. We rarely stray more than a dozen yards from its reckoning, following it through an Anywhere America lakeside, strands of wood seething with fecund folly. As thralls to its death march from the moment it strikes the surface, the entity embodies a living rebellion of the earth’s own stratigraphy— a mad dead history, returned to erase these subjects from the frame, aberrant data whirring about until destined deletion. The whims and fancies of the youth in its path are negated completely, one by one shorn from life and film with impunity. This is the anti-human subjectivity. Where the camera grants light and life, the cut to black has always already reaped its due.
SPOILERS AHEAD! Continue at your own peril, bitch!
Nature delivers a font of gore wedded to simply the most goated practical effects of the decade. When a coterie of jock pigs, moba gamers, midwest princesses, and woofiends apiece come to commence their br*t s*mmer in a fatherless behaviour fashion, a locket pilfered from a collapsed fire tower spells their doom. The entity births its humanoid mass from the forest floor seconds after its earthen entombment is desecrated. The back of its shorn and putrid skull is a mutant’s grimace—a ruin of sore flesh writhing under a cratered moon of point blank buckshot, its silvered demonic gaze sealing our pact with its gnosis of extermination. Within minutes it intrudes upon its first prize, a bumbling hick who gets clapped by his own bear trap attempting an escape. We’re left hungry on the kill by a mid grasp smash-cut to the yokel’s filthy abode, its putrid hand instead reaching to a similar locket. What trace sentiment it seeks has been absconded. The piece hanging by the mantle reads #1 Mother Fucker, as did the dead man’s dipshit baseball cap. Enraged, it scavenges its signature armament—a rusted set of hooks and chains— and disperses amidst the copse of its inception.
The entity lurches through nightfall and onto our merry band of internet-afflicted adolescents fireside, lore-pilling each other on the forests they’ve readily disgraced. Ehren (Sam Roulston) recounts the story of Johnny, a logging camp shopkeeper’s son from generations prior suffering from severe mental disability, flown from a fire tower by vengeful loggers after one of their own slipped on a stray toy. Posthumously affixed with a crude firefighter’s headpiece, Johnny was a murder masked as a moron’s folly. As the camera draws a noose around the flame-lit campers, Ehren tells of the logging camp’s fate—a score of men all dead and disemboweled. The police investigating The White Pine Massacre blamed their passing on tainted scullery meat, and the gore on scavenging wildlife. The locals say it was Johnny dispensing his killers. They selfie and bicker back to the cabin as Johnny watches on.
The bulk of the film indulges us in a masterful execution of executions that will doubtless be imitated for years to come. Johnny inflicts on the campers the same instruments required of industrially precise resource extraction: drawknives, buzzsaws, drownings, axe swings, and dragging hooks—as if he were preparing them for transport and further refinement into pool cues and wayfare cabinets. The mask he comes to crown himself with, the bygone firefighter’s leather shroud he was murdered in, coronates Johnny as the high overlord of corpse eaters, with girded glass segmentae for compound eyes and zippers for sheathed mandibles. The carrion feeder has become the apex predator, an evolutionary failsafe only precedented by mass extinction. The sole survivor of this die-off is Kris (Andrea Pavlovic), emerging through the dawn limping and bleeding. The woman in the pickup truck (Lauren Taylor) finds Kris barely alive and agrees to psychopomp her to the hospital, but Johnny has become intangible from the endless thicket blurring past. Her anticipation of death is a rolling boil throughout this final sequence, as the woman driving her tells a long story of her brother’s near fatal bear encounter in these same woods. No Country For Old Men (Coen & Coen) percolates through this final scene, a self-admitted waxing on the McCarthian carnage Kris may ultimately succumb to as we close out.
Director Chris Nash effortlessly shook off years of reshooting, production issues, and a wasp horde transmitted tetanus infection to deliver a highly satisfactory bloodbath that deploys a ruthless economy of pace, subtlety, and craft. The decision to crank the lemming factor of Johnny’s victims through their half-canned dialogues and stupefyingly shitty yet spectacular deaths light a candle for slasher victims past. In A Violent Nature takes its exsanguinated excursion through the woods between metamodernist horror like Resolution (Benson & Moorehead) and the classic haplessness of Scream (Craven). Though the sequel announcement is disheartening, Nash can hopefully stitch the head back onto a new body reanimated by whatever entity reaches for our throats this time.
