A group of rowdy teens party in a secluded cabin in the woods, only to be systematically and grotesquely killed off by a masked murderer. Sounds familiar, right?
Well, “In a Violent Nature” switches things up from classic horror formula. It firmly plants the camera behind the slow, methodical Johnny, an undead, vengeful killer, as he stomps through the Canadian wilderness and mutilates the campers one by one. Half “Friday the 13th” slasher and half David Attenborough nature documentary, “In a Violent Nature” is unlike any other horror movie and has one of the top contenders for best kill of the year.
Directed by Chris Nash, “In a Violent Nature” filmed in a remote region of Northern ontario — so remote that it would take upwards of 30 minutes to hike to set.
“To my producers’ chagrin, I’m always like, ‘No, it takes place in the middle of nowhere, so we have to go into the middle of nowhere. We have to make our days so much longer than they need to be,'” Nash, who scouted locations near his hometown, tells PvNew.
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One of the most idyllic locations also features the film’s most stomach-churning death: the yoga kill. One of the campers, Aurora (Charlotte Creaghan), ventures off alone to do some high-altitude yoga on a cliffside when Johnny targets her as his next unlucky victim. In a gore-tastic sequence, Johnny disembowels Aurora with his trusty, rusty hook, then yanks her head backwards through the gaping hole in her stomach. Johnny kicks the human pretzel down the cliff, where her mangled, mutilated body rolls halfway down.
“I really wanted to make sure Johnny’s tools were used very uniquely,” Nash says. “He’s got hooks, so we don’t just have him stab people with hooks if he could stab them with a machete. Hooks are for pulling and dragging. For that one, I started with a hook in the head. Then how can he drag somebody with that? What if he punched through with the hook, then hooked the person’s head? Is this over yet? No, he could do a little more until there’s no turning back. We’ve crossed the Rubicon; she is a goner.”
For that kill, Nash and special effects lead Steven Kostanski used three silicone Aurora dummies with detachable limbs and fake hook appliances. Each body had its head and torso at different stages of contortion, including one where the neck could stretch up to 180-degrees to fit in the stomach hole. Most impressively, since the dummy weighed around 50 pounds, the kick down the cliffside was done in one take.
“The body was supposed to fall way to the bottom, but it went halfway down and we’re like, ‘Are we gonna get another one? Who’s gonna run down there and pull that body back up?'” Nash recalls. “It’s kind of funnier that it only goes halfway down. Johnny’s just like, ‘Eh, good enough. Carry on.'”
The wilderness and weather took its toll on the shoot, and one kill right before the yoga scene had to be scrapped and reimagined completely. Underwater and undetected, Johnny walks the length of a small lake and drowns Brodie (Lea Rose Sebastianis), one of Aurora’s friends. After she thrashes around, all that’s seen is a red cloud billowing up from the water, and Johnny emerges. Originally, the kill would’ve included an underwater camera and a hooked foot, but heavy rain changed the shoot.
“That was going to be a very unnecessarily complex shot, where we we follow Johnny as he walked into the lake,” reveals Nash. “The camera was gonna continue over the surface of the lake and land right behind the two girls that are talking. Then Brodie is pulled out there and the cameras dive under the water. It was all going to be one take and we were going to shoot her death completely underwater. We had dive teams, lifeguards, everything. But we were facing unprecedented weather conditions at the time.”
“[Nash] had the whole thing storyboarded out,” Kostanski adds. “The whole idea was that Johnny walks into the water, stands at the bottom of the lake, there’s a girl swimming above him and he just hooks her foot, pulls her down and holds her there until she drowns. We had a fake foot that we could actually push the hook through. There was also a half hook we would attach to the actress so we could have a real foot for some of it. There were conversations about making sure that we don’t pump too much blood in and it obscures the frame, but the weather led to it ultimately being axed and turning into what it is in the movie now. So maybe in the sequel.”
The ending of “In a Violent Nature” leaves the door open for Johnny to wreak more terror, and Nash has ideas that aren’t “retreading” the first movie — but he’s not revealing anything yet.
“I feel like there’s definitely room for more Johnny adventures,” says Kostanski. “I wouldn’t mind seeing him end up in suburbia at some point. Just the feeling of walking around with this character in a back alley — somewhere while people are just living their lives — is pretty spooky. I would entertain that. And then by part four, maybe he goes to space. We’ll see.”
“In a Violent Nature” is now playing in theaters in wide release.
