What new perspective can one bring to the horror genre? With his directorial debut, Chris Nash answers this question with a resoundingly brutal and formally fascinating answer. Primarily following a murderer’s steps and slashes through his travels terrorizing those near a remote cabin, the wonderfully Béla Tarr-esque In a Violent Nature sticks to its meticulous conceit and delivers one of the most chilling horror movies I’ve seen in years. Ahead of a May 31 theatrical release from IFC Films, which will be unrated, the new trailer has arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “When a locket is removed from a collapsed fire tower in the woods that entombs the rotting corpse of Johnny, a vengeful spirit spurred on by a horrific 60-year-old crime, his body is resurrected and becomes hellbent on retrieving it. The undead golem hones in on the group of vacationing teens responsible for the theft and proceeds to methodically slaughter them one by one in his mission to get it back – along with anyone in his way.”
John Fink said in his Sundance review, “A slow-cinema spin on well-burnished tropes, In a Violent Nature largely strips the artifice of the slasher formula, which dictates a deformed man must hunt down attractive teens or young adults in either the woods or suburbia. A film built around a mythology that comes to life, as our killer rises from a grave, Chris Nash’s picture could almost be the kind of film Kelly Reichardt might make if her current patron A24 asked her to make a slasher flick.”
See the new trailer below.