Writer/Director Chris Nash’s feature debut, In a Violent Nature, is set to unleash an arthouse twist on the slasher in theaters this Friday, but the journey getting there has been long and arduous. So much so that Nash reshot a large percentage of the film just to get it, and the gory practical effects, just right.
That included a recast of the film’s undead slasher villain, Johnny (Ry Barrett), who is unwittingly summoned when a locket is removed from a collapsed fire tower in the woods that entombs his rotting corpse. That spells terrible news for the campers vacationing in his territory.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with filmmaker Chris Nash and star Ry Barrett ahead of the film’s theatrical release about Johnny’s nature and the tough hurdles in making this unique indie horror film. The inspiration behind In a Violent Nature, Nash reveals, didn’t actually originate from iconic slashers, and that informed his overall approach to the arthouse horror movie.
Nash tells us, “I took a lot of inspiration from Gus Van Sant’s 2000s work of Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days. I love those movies, and I really wanted to see what I could do to bring that into a genre film. The slasher just seemed like the best way to do that; especially, the ‘slasher in the woods’ type of thing. We can really just hang out in that environment. But the main thing for nailing the tone was really, I think, just stepping back and letting the scenes just exist as they were and not even aiming for a tone.
“It was a weird thing talking it over with Pierce Derks, my cinematographer,” Nash continues. “We didn’t have the biggest budget to do something crazy and wild with lighting and stuff, and I was like, ‘Well, let’s just go super naturalistic.’ He said, “Yeah, no look is also a look.” So, this is very much a ‘no tone is a tone’ type of movie. We tried to treat it almost like making a nature documentary where we’re just following something, or following a letter carrier at work, just going from house to house. It’s not the most thrilling work in the world, but it’s honest work. That’s how we approached it, being as objective as we could.”
What is a nature documentary without a subject? In a Violent Nature finds it in the undead Johnny, quietly stalking through the woods for large swaths of the runtime. What was Nash looking for when searching for the right actor to play the killer, you might be wondering?
“I’m still trying to answer that question myself,” Nash responds. “I definitely feel like we found it, and we lucked out with Ry. Ry actually stepped in to replace the actor that we originally had cast as Johnny. This was one of the problems that we faced during our first attempt at shooting, as the actor that we had portraying Johnny had to step away for medical reasons. So we had replacements come in. At the time, we were thinking, ‘This isn’t going to be too much of a problem because he’s in a costume the whole time.’ But when you’re following this mute character, as an audience, you’re picking up on everything. When you don’t have those visual cues, you’re just seeing all the physicality and the tiny, tiny differences between posture, between where people actually hold their weight when they’re walking, and just the size of the gate itself.
Nash continues, “It was pretty shocking and pretty jarring when we had that assembly together of like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s that actor. That’s that actor.’ We could see that it was completely different. So, when we asked Ry to step in, we did a lot of rehearsals with him. We talked about how to walk. He actually did research himself. He was watching animal videos, just nature videos of animals walking to try to just get a feel for how a predator would walk around the woods stalking its prey.”
Barrett added, “They had an initial shoot that I wasn’t a part of, and that was about a full year before they approached me and had decided to reshoot. At that time, I don’t think it was a plan to reshoot everything, but there were key scenes and key moments that they definitely had to 100% go back and redo. The entire film is pivoting on his movements and everything; I think you’d be able to tell if suddenly it was somebody different. So then the decision, on top of a bunch of other factors, was made to reshoot the entire thing. I was really happy to be on board, and the fact that they were going to do that, and to kind of build this character and just be there for all of it.”
As for Barrett’s process of cracking his character, he looked to Nash’s script.
“I think Johnny is supposed to be a bit of a mystery, psychologically and what is going through his head,” Barrett explains. “It was more about, I think, treating him like an animal, like a wild animal sort of, and that’s what the analogy [in the film] sort of encapsulates: what Johnny is and how he works. I looked at it that way because of that. The monologue that Lauren Taylor gives is that he’s like a wild animal, a bear that just has something wrong, and that’s how he operates. It doesn’t necessarily make sense what he’s doing, but it does to him.”
“The suit really lends itself to the character,“ Barrett elaborates. “I had my rules that I stuck to, but once you get into the suit as Johnny, it kind of just locks everything into place. Getting the suit on wasn’t too extensive of a thing. There was an underlayer, like Under Armor, with skin, latex skin, and everything looking like it’s rotted underneath the pants and underneath the shirt. Then there was either a cowl I wore some days with an open mask that you’d see the back of Johnny’s head, and then other days there was the mask, the full mask, and then some days we had the mask that had a cutout so I could see better and move better. The only the real day that took the most time was the day where you actually see Johnny’s face. That was a longer makeup day because that was a full application and took probably close to three hours.”
It wasn’t just the actor that changed during the reshoots, but Johnny’s design, too. Nash walks us through some of those key changes that ended up improving upon his original vision.
Nash explains, “Watching the assembly cut, we realized that there were small things that we could improve upon that just changed the tone rather dramatically. For instance, how far we followed behind Johnny with the camera, just giving him that perfect amount of space in the frame. Because we were a lot closer the first time around, and the second time around, we were like, ‘We need to pull back a lot further.‘ Another thing that we were looking at was we actually redesigned the weather mask. It was a much more accurate depiction of what the actual firefighting mask was in real life, but we realized that it kind of looked a little too much like a diving bell; it looked a little too goofy. So, we redesigned it, made it a lot more form-fitting to his head, and gave it that goggle look for just kind of more of a piercing eye.”
“There were so many things we took away from the first time around, even just how we were achieving some gore gags, little flourishes we could throw in,” he adds. “So I don’t recommend, and I also very much recommend, reshooting movies in their entirety before you release them.”
Check out In a Violent Nature in theaters this weekend, and stay tuned for a follow-up interview piece here on Bloody Disgusting about the film’s practical effects and gory kills.
