In A Violent Nature

Slasher movies are one of the most enduring horror subgenres, which is another way of saying they are among the most popular. Although they take many specific forms and, in the development of the genre, had many precursors (Hitchcock, monster movies, Italian giallo thrillers, the "proto-slashers" of the 60s and 70s), the basic formula was codified in the late seventies and early eighties. John Carpenter's Halloween is frequently cited as the film that pulled together the disparate threads and wove them into the tapestry of tropes we have known since.

The killer is a man who has been psychologically twisted beyond the human by childhood trauma. The nature of the formative trauma is typically dime store Freud: the future killer was subjected to some kind of sexual shock or abuse perpetrated by or on a female family member; or was otherwise abused or bullied as an "outsider" (often due to some physical deformity or mental illness); or in some other way has childishly misunderstood and conflated sexuality and violence, and connected those acts with their own sense of abandonment (by a female family member) or experience of abuse (at the hands of a caregiver or peer). The result is a severe psychosis that leads him, as an adult, to violently murder any person who reminds him of his trauma or anyone foolish enough to stand in the way of his revenge transference, in which, by brutally murdering a random person, he enacts a fantasy of revenge against his own abusers or neglecters.

In spite of this generally clear throughline of pop psychological motivation, the killer is often described as a force of Pure Evil, that is, a post-human monster incapable of remediation or remorse, who can only be neutralized, but never cured.

The victims of the killer are mostly nubile teenagers or twenty-somethings, who are on the cusp of adulthood and who mostly fail an unstated purity test by having sex or consuming drugs and alcohol. Because the fulcrum of the killer's mental break is founded on a loss of innocence—or childhood purity—they attempt, fruitlessly, to return to their own innocence by violently punishing those who would cross that line by their own choice. Ironically, adult characters who scold the teenagers for their loose morals are also routinely killed, suggesting that the killer is psychologically trapped within a mother/whore dichotomy he cannot escape.

This particular fixation means slasher movies are among the most conservative of cautionary tales. The central fear that animates them is the fear of lost innocence or, stated perhaps more productively, the fear of sex. The "rules" for surviving a slasher killer are well known—indeed they were clearly explained in the 1996 meta-slasher, Scream: sex = death. (Although Wes Craven's other famed slasher franchise, A Nightmare On Elm Street, interestingly, subverts many of the accepted tropes of the genre.)

One of the chief criticisms of the precursors, proto-slashers and slasher movies has been that the filmmakers deliberately create viewer identification with the killer. One famous precursor, Michael Powell's 1960 Peeping Tom, does this by having the mostly unseen killer film his victims' deaths with a movie camera, so that the visual point of view is quite literally both the killer's and our own as viewers. Another precursor, Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho, is more subtle about it, but pulls off a bravura realignment of audience sympathy when, after our protagonist is murdered in the shower, we are made to root for Norman Bates, as he desperately attempts to cover up the killing—perpetrated, supposedly, by his mother.

Slasher movies, as they were born as a genre, have used similar techniques. In Halloween (1978), future killer Michael Myers is just a boy, abandoned by his older sister on the night in question, when she prefers to gallop upstairs to have sex with her boyfriend, rather than take young Michael out for trick-or-treating. He dons his clown mask and we see directly through the eyeholes as he removes a large knife from a kitchen drawer and heads upstairs where he stabs his topless sister to death. Moments later, he stands traumatized on the front lawn, mask removed, still clutching the bloody knife, as his absent parents return from their evening out.

Most slasher movies have continued this tradition, also exemplified by the well-known voyeuristic perspective shots in the Friday the 13th series. Although the first film famously subverts our expectations about the identity of the killer, it introduces a moving camera frame, sneaking slowly through the dark woods, peering in cabin windows (often at naked girls) and sneaking up on unsuspecting victims from behind. Again, we are the killer—we are the bereft, the abused, the traumatized, and we take our revenge.

We are also trapped in the crossed-wires psychopathy, and we know it—we, too, seek out the beautiful, young, naked bodies (nearly always in a heavy-breathing male gaze), then we trade one taboo for another by brutally destroying them, often seen, at least partially, from the killer's direct perspective. At this point in film history, this is all cliche upon cliche upon cliche. Even Scream's winking acknowledgment of the profusion of tropes is an old cliche now.

All of this is what makes the newly released Canadian slasher, In A Violent Nature, written and directed by Chris Nash, so interesting for fans of the genre. (And an interesting example of a heavily split critic/audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and other online measures—low quantity movie viewers don't get it.)

The story is generic slasher boilerplate—it's basically a Friday the 13th movie and the killer is basically Jason. You've got your stock horny youngsters, including the stoner, the jealous boyfriend, the lesbians and the Final Girl. They head out to the cabin in the woods, near a lake. On the way, they steal a gold locket they find in the woods—which turns out to be the maternal talisman keeping the killer buried. They tell a scary story (which naturally is the backstory) around a campfire. There's a crusading forest ranger and a jerkoff hick poacher. The kids smoke and drink and—maybe they have sex? It's unclear.

Because nearly all of that is in the background. It happens largely off-screen or in the periphery of the frame, until it doesn't. Instead, the film centers the killer—literally. He doesn't speak. He shows no emotion. He just claws himself out of the earth shortly after the locket is taken and goes on the hunt. We watch him, from behind, often in full frame, as he trudges through the beautiful woods. Many of the shots recall Gus Van Sant's death trilogy (Gerry, Elephant and Last Days from 2002-2005) in that we simply follow this character around for most of the film. This is not "slow cinema," though, with single shots that last forever. But the effect is the opposite of the typical slasher voyeurism. It's the opposite of the forced psychological identification, the shared POV. Instead, the film is something of a pop treatise on the nature of evil—and the evil of nature.

We are distanced enough from both the killer and the victims for most of the film that, in our detachment, we can see the situation more clearly. There is no question of psychology, or human motive. He wants his locket back, but he doesn't even know it—it's just pure animal instinct. When the talisman was stolen, a circuit closed in the animal brain and—almost like a machine—it did what was in its nature to do. Which turns out to be to perpetrate some of the most gruesome, disgusting killings you will ever see in a movie. This extremity serves to drive the point home: you cannot escape nature.

There is a purity there that is beyond revenge, beyond meaning. And it's terrifying.