Sundance Midnighters sometimes make headlines for someone passing out, throwing up, or otherwise freaking out at a screening—and In A Violent Nature is the rare film that actually deserves the hyperbole. The press event I attended in Park City peaked with a woman yelling, “Oh God. Oh, God. OH MY GOD,” during a gruesome kill scene, which got other people giggling, which spread into hooting and clapping. Just a good time at the movies, you know?
But emphasizing the squish factor is only telling half the story of In A Violent Nature, which boldly combines slasher-movie kicks with a meditative arthouse style. Reviewers have compared it to the Dardenne Brothers, Ingmar Bergman, and Terrence Malick—I detected notes of Jonathan Glazer, personally—and director Chris Nash namedrops Gus van Sant when talking about his debut feature.
A lot of filmmakers talk about “reinventing the slasher,” but Nash and his crew have actually done it. So of course I had to talk to him at Sundance, digging deep into Nash’s intuitive, almost musical process.
Note that some light spoilers—nothing related to the plot, but there is a discussion of the film’s killer, Johnny, and his preferred killing implements—lie ahead.
Chris Nash: It’s an offspring of it. I would say [Friday the 13th] is intrinsic to the existence of this film because it built the framework. We’re not reinventing the wheel, but we are looking at the wheel from a different side.
CN: So much of the movie was a test of, “is this going to work?” Because you’re absolutely correct. The score is intrinsic to a slasher. So what happens when you remove that? How do you feel? How do the deaths make you feel when you’re just faced with the stark vision of what they are? All of that definitely came into play. Every choice was very deliberate from the start.
I feel like I’m always trying to rip off No Country for Old Men in some way. And that movie doesn’t have a score. I just think it’s letting every moment exist for what it is. Score can be such a crutch. After shooting this, I’ll be watching a movie and I’ll be like, “Man, this is a really good moment.” Then I think, “No, I just like this song. I can listen to this song [by itself] and feel the exact same way.” There is no interaction between what we’re seeing and the music. The music is carrying everything on its shoulders, and there’s got to be more symbiosis.
We also didn’t want to drown out the sounds of the woods themselves. So much of what we’re feeling as an audience is from watching our monster man walk through the woods. This is such a rote film school thing to say, but the setting is a character, and you don’t want to have music blaring over the character’s dialogue.
CN: I guess, if you’re going for something more traditional.
CN: The movie is so much of a mood piece. The character is also not in a rush to get anything done. And him being so methodical, just step one at a time walking to these kills, it does make it seem a little more sinister. A little more inhuman. He’s devoid of emotion.
CN: I’ve never thought about that. I’ve only thought about emotional drive, and removing that.
CN: He’s not aimless, and he is making decisions to interact with his environment in certain ways. I don’t know where that thought comes from, though, I’ll say that. Because if you’re just trying to kill somebody, there are less bloody ways to do it. But are those going to be as fun?
CN: Those are cooldowns. You’re composing a whole piece.
CN: Yeah. So for instance, on set, I loved the walking. There were times when we were shooting, and I was like, “I just want to watch this movie.”
CN: Yeah. Completely unsellable. So I loved it. [Laughs]
My editor Alex and I did have to make choices with regard to, “How long are we going to stay on these [shots]?” For our first assembly cut, we used as much [footage] as we possibly could. There was a tracking shot that was a very specific choice in terms of the size of the lens we used, how much space [Johnny is] taking in the frame, and how long we stayed with it. And we love that shot.
And playing the piece as a whole, with the ups and downs, there are deliberate choices like, “Okay, we’re going to use that shot right after our most gruesome kill, and have that be a palate cleanser.” Letting everybody sit with that for a while.
CN: That was such an autopilot.
CN: Johnny has his tools. He’s got his weapons. For me, it was about thinking of ways to utilize them in more creative ways, where it’s like, “You couldn’t do this with a machete.” Using the tools to actually do something specific and unique to those [implements].
CN: They’re called drag hooks, and they’re used for wrapping around big logs. You wrap ‘em, put ’em on a backhoe or whatever—or a horse, back when—and take them out of the woods and throw them in the river.
CN: And also a banana peel joke.
CN: Just the slapstick of it, too.
CN: Well, some of them are just for me. “This is dumb, in a gloriously dumb way.” But you also need those moments of levity. You can’t have the film without them.
CN: It’d be a really, really bleak movie if you didn’t put those moments in.
CN: They’re fun. So you have to have some levity to it. But instead of the characters joking around with each other, we thought, “Let’s just make the kills [funny].” Even how they’re timed—the final death in the movie, for instance. That was funny to me, the duration of how long it goes on. I was like, “No, this will be funny. This will come back around. Don’t worry when he just doesn’t stop.”
CN: Well, originally I really wanted all the sound to be from the perspective of Johnny the whole time. I was fine with barely hearing the dialogue. And so when we were mixing everything, that’s what I told our audio mixers, and they were like, “Okay, this will be cool.” And they did an amazing job. But when we watched the cut, it was so quiet that it was a white noise machine. It was totally ASMR. It was almost too relaxing.
CN: You’re hearing the wind through the trees, and it’s just like, “Oh, we’re going to put people to sleep.” Also, because we’re not giving [viewers] a conventional story, and we’re light on slasher tropes and conventional slasher structure—not giving the audience definitive [conversations] was too much. [In the original mix], a character’s talking, and we understand that there’s some conflict going on, but you just hear noise in the background. You might catch a bit of it at the end. We were like, “Oh, we can’t do that.”
CN: It was too far in that direction. So we had to pull back and bring those discussions forward in the mix. But we still had to create the feeling that this was happening in the background. Finding that balance was tricky.
CN: Oh, just feeling it out.
CN: Yeah. It’s super frame-specific too. My editor and I would say, “let’s take two more frames off of this before we cut.” The feel had to be perfect for us.
CN: Exactly. Nothing is really changing, but you’re playing a note, and you were a beat off.
CN: I’ve been lugging a set of drums around from apartment to apartment for 20 years, but never playing them. [Laughs] So whatever that’s worth.
CN: It’s based on a 19th-century mask firefighters and smokejumpers used called the Vajen Bader fire protection helmet. It’s creepy as fuck—the idea that you’re already trapped in a burning building, or in the middle of a forest fire, and you just want to be saved, and then the scariest thing ever comes towards you… Seeing that mask, I was like, “Oh, that’s a great mask. That’s a good slasher thing.”
CN: We were super specific about saving that reveal. It’s the closest we come to humanizing Johnny, but also never going so far as to treat this like a Frankenstein story. I don’t want any sympathy or empathy for him, just a hint that something was there once.
CN: Yep.
CN: I started principal photography in September 2021, and we wrapped our final pickup unit in December 2022.
CN: There were two different blocks of shooting. We did significant reshoots, to the point where we essentially reshot the entire film. Our first four-week shoot in September of 2021 was our principal photography shoot, and being a low-budget production, we had low-budget production issues. A bunch of significant things happened that were really hard on us.
There was a point where we were making concessions to try to get things done, get things shot. But in the end, we looked back at the footage and we did an assembly cut of everything we shot. And it was just like, “This is not the feeling. This is not the tone of this film.”
CN: It didn’t feel right. So we had to make the decision to reshoot the entirety of what we did.
CN: With significantly less money.
CN: It felt like the movie was kidnapped and then ransomed, both by ourselves, from ourselves.
CN: The whole time we were like, “How are we going to come up with this money so we can see our film again?” So we had to really buckle down. We trimmed down the amount of crew, to the point where it was like, “Okay, now the producers are doing wardrobe.” It became the kind of low-budget backyard film that we’d made forever. And when the weather changed and it was winter, we couldn’t pick up until spring anyway. But that gave us six months to really figure out all this stuff and go at it stronger and more prepared the next time.
CN: Well, for instance, we changed our camera package. We had a much larger camera package [on the first round of shooting] and just packing in and packing out—it’s incredibly difficult when you’re shooting in the middle of the woods. We didn’t fully realize the difficulty of that.
CN: A lot of schlepping. So we need a package now that is versatile and we still get what we want, but throwing a backpack, things like that. Also, just looking at the footage and being like, “We should have taken Johnny just two or three steps further back.” Things like that, refining his space in the frame to just give it a different feeling.