Doing something new with the slasher subgenre in horror is like reanimating a corpse—possible (at least, according to many of the genre’s offerings) but tricky, and too often the product remains lifeless. Triggered by the blockbuster success of John Carpenter’s low-budget 1978 Halloween, the early-1980s deluge of cookie-cutter hack-’em-ups slowed to a drip by the end of the decade, and it wasn’t until 1996 that the subgenre saw a resurgence thanks to Scream. Directed by Wes Craven, who helmed first-wave slasher classic A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream reinvigorated the cinematic slaughter of dumb, horny teens by having its tuned-in characters discuss the rules of the genre, sometimes to the point of pontification. Self-awareness yielded a new flood that petered out within a decade or so. Since then, truly relevant slashers have been rare. David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween requel hit hard by reinvesting in beloved characters (namely, Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode and her antagonist, Michael Myers). The Scream movies have continued to capitalize on a similar hunger for reboots and the franchise’s commitment to smart-assery. Halina Reijn’s 2022 Bodies Bodies Bodies began with a familiar template (a bunch of teens getting picked off in a house without electricity on a dark and stormy night), but its maniac-free resolution contorted the genre just enough to feel fresh.

Chris Nash’s Canadian slasher In a Violent Nature does a similarly slight twisting of slasher tropes, and the result is something novel yet familiar: a Goldilocks approach to innovation. Perhaps most striking is how unconcerned Nash seems to be with scaring his audience. The movie sets aside such timeworn, manipulative tools as jump scares and dramatic scoring. Sounds of the forest, such as the rustling of leaves and the chirping of bugs, provide sonic ambience, while all music is diegetic, coming not from any composer but from the characters themselves. (This doesn’t mean that it’s not used to great effect, as when the Walkman of a fresh kill keeps playing after its batteries have already started to drain, so what we hear coming out of the headphones sounds melted.) The killer here—a partially decomposed zombie and subject of local legend named Johnny, who has the hulking frame and baldness of Jason Voorhees—surprises his victims but rarely us, because the camera spends most of the movie’s 94-minute runtime following not Johnny’s targets but Johnny himself.

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Though this is In a Violent Nature’s most radical creative decision, it’s also rooted in horror history: The original Friday the 13th and Halloween movies open from the killer’s point of view. However, we don’t see the world through Johnny’s eyes per se. We follow him, watching his back and head (complete with a metal stake lodged in it), as in a third-person video game. Much of the conversation that takes place among his prey—mainly, a handful of young adults who are staying in a cabin in a section of the forest called White Pines—occurs in the background as he stalks them. This includes a confrontation between a ranger and a local over the latter’s bear traps, as well as the something’s-not-right epiphany that occurs when the members of the interloping group realize that their numbers are dwindling. Nash, who also wrote the script, seems to acknowledge that a great degree of the dialogue in pre-Scream slashers is prattle and relegates it to being just barely within earshot. Elsewhere, the movie is unabashedly referential: “What are you waiting for?” calls a character to the unseen killer, echoing Jennifer Love Hewitt’s battle cry in I Know What You Did Last Summer. In all of these ways, In a Violent Nature is a horror fan’s horror movie: To understand what makes it special, you have to understand not just what it’s doing but what it’s not doing, and to fully appreciate it requires a decent amount of knowledge. It’s hardly a surprise that Nash has opted for a VHS-reminiscent 4:3 aspect ratio.

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Nash has cited inspiration from Gus Van Sant’s “death trilogy”—the inspired-by-real-life dramas Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days—which he describes as “slower, more methodical, more deliberate” and whose movies “follow characters through a scene.” (Van Sant himself touted Tomb Raider as his own inspiration.) Though the movie takes the time to stew in its own stagnant juices, its pace makes it no less brutal than a typical slasher. Death is always imminent, even as our antihero walks through idyllic landscapes at various times of day (the most beautiful of which occurs at golden hour, with a tangerine sky above and yellow wildflowers all around). This is a movie that is as concerned with its Ontario-shot setting as it is with what the majority of its audience has signed up for: carnage. Some deaths are elegantly staged—Johnny’s hand reaches out to his first victim; the scene cuts and shows that same hand bloodied. The murder is telegraphed only by implication. There’s a rather quiet, yet more elaborate scene that involves drowning in a lake: Johnny spots his next casualty across the water, he wades in (we’re to understand he’s walking across the lake’s floor), and a few minutes later, she’s pulled under. She’s allowed one last gasp at the surface before submerging again. Then her body floats.

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The gore isn’t always so subtle: There’s also a bludgeoning by axe (it’s a thing!), a head exploding when a rock is dropped on it, and the pulling of one victim’s head through a hole Johnny just made in her torso. This one is particularly on the nose, as we see the dearly departed doing yoga before her demise. It’s the kind of kill that would prompt Freddy Krueger to say something like “Namaste, bitch!”

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We follow Johnny, but we don’t exactly identify with him. It’s kind of hard to empathize with a murder machine whose peaceful (?) rest has been disturbed by the stealing of a locket at his gravesite by one of the camping kids. That creates a disconnect that makes much of In a Violent Nature feel more like an exercise than a proper horror flick in terms of the sheer adrenaline it gets pumping. Imagine a roller coaster without climbs and drops that is still very much a roller coaster by virtue of the fact that you’re strapped into a cart on rails. However, suspense permeates the final 20 minutes or so. (Read no further if you don’t want to hear what happens—and, just as importantly, doesn’t happen—at the movie’s conclusion.)

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The de facto final girl—whose characterization is so spare that she could have been any of the other girls she was staying with in the cabin—watches Johnny murder the last of her friends and, instead of attempting the plan they had hatched to rebury him, flees. She’s not cut out for the role she’s found herself in; she’s simply not final girl material. After a horrifying run through the woods that leaves her with a nasty gash on her leg, she miraculously finds a road and, even more miraculously, is picked up by a driver who vows to help her. We know what to expect: Ever since 1976, when Carrie ended with the hand of its title character bursting up from her grave, it’s been de rigueur to lull the audience into a false sense of security before one last scare. Johnny should pop out of the woods before they can drive off (much like Leatherface does in the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre as Sally’s being saved via big rig) or when they stop to tend to her wound. They should get a flat tire, or the driver should turn out to be in cahoots with the killer.

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Instead, we get no such scare. The movie ends with its effective protagonist gazing into the woods, waiting for the reappearance of the monster that just terrorized her. He does not materialize. We get the feeling that this is the first day of the rest of her life as more elegiac shots of the outdoors display on screen. Barring a sequel, she’ll spend her days looking into the woods, trying to parse out whether she’s safe, and never quite succeeding.

A more recent horror convention is the deliberate projection of social awareness. Horror movies have long been about trauma, especially when their calloused heroes return in sequels, but 2018’s Halloween was practically marketed as a meditation on trauma (or “trow-ma,” according to its star, Jamie Lee Curtis). Sometimes this social awareness proves resonant, as with Jordan Peele’s Get Out, but often it just reads as pretense, a socially redeeming excuse for all the evisceration that’s the real attraction. In a Violent Nature isn’t so didactic. Besides the impression that someone who just went through hell may remain there mentally, the movie has little to no message. Like a swift axe to the skull, In a Violent Nature is blunt and makes no excuses for itself. How refreshing.