IN A VIOLENT NATURE

CONTAINS A FEW SPOILERS

Unstoppable masked killer picking off teens? Check. Maniac's origin story told as a cruel and tragic campfire legend? Check. Annoying young victims, at least two of whom frankly deserve it? Check. Local law enforcement powerless to assist? Check. At least one outrageous gore highlight? Check. And yet... not. Because while In A Violent Nature certainly ticks all the boxes on the eighties slasher template, it does them in completely the opposite way. This is the antithesis of the standard woodland slasher, which does the exact opposite of everything that makes a typical teenkill horror movie. This is the anti-Jason, the anti-Cropsy, the anti-Madman Marz.

In content, it is precisely what you remember and love from the Friday The 13th sequels, The Burning, Madman and all those other slight variations on those themes. His wasteland grave disturbed by a bunch of charmless youngsters, the wordless, remorseless bogeyman figure Johnny rises, methodically tracks down the intruders and dispassionately kills them. And that's it. Where this film differs from the Fridays and similar is in its style: shot in 4:3 squarevision, with minimal editing as the camera forever hovers behind Johnny's shoulder as he stalks and slashes, accompanied by the sound of utter silence rather than shrieking violin stabs or low sawtooth synths; the film has no music score. The shouldervision and lack of editing also means it allows us to fully relish the ludicrous overkill of one particularly gruesome death scene, by not cutting discreetly to a blood spurt or something else entirely while the murder continues off-screen.

It's an interesting experiment: to take the standard 80s stabfest and rip out any semblance of artifice or style. But what you end up with is a series of very slow plods through drab fields and woods as you just traipse along behind the monster murderer. We're obviously not getting the killer's POV you'd expect, because he's on screen pretty much the whole time, but we hardly ever get anyone else's perspective either. Only in the final reel, when it looks like the Final Girl might actually be getting away, does our viewpoint tear away from Johnny's shoulder blades.

Is that enough? Personally I'm not sure: this new angle on familiar territory dispenses with a lot of the usual tropes and techniques, but those are the things I liked about those slasher movies - Harry Manfredini's strings, subjective camera, editing to speed the movie along. Not to suggest that The Final Chapter or A New Beginning were particularly involving, but In A Violent Nature absolutely and deliberately isn't.

**