“I wanted it to be like a slasher in every way, but from a different angle” – Director Chris Nash On In A Violent Nature

In A Violent Nature is every bit your typical slasher film – and yet it's unique in every single way. Director Chris Nash takes all the tropes we know and love in the horror subgenre and twists them on their head (much like the villain's poor victims) to create something fresh and exciting for new and old genre fans alike. The film follows the reanimated corpse of Johnny (Ry Barrett) who rises from the grave hellbent on retrieving a locket disturbed in its resting place by a group of holidaymakers.

Seems pretty simple, right? Well, prepare to see it's anything but when the film In A Violent Nature comes to UK cinemas on July 12. Ahead of its release, FILMHOUNDS caught up with Nash to talk about how he set about balancing old tropes with a new take, designing a new horror icon, and the possibility of a sequel.

In A Violent Nature is coming to cinemas this month. How did you come up with the concept?

I'd always been a genre fan growing up. I think a lot of kids my age grew up watching horror and slasher movies. They're a pretty important part of our upbringing. And I'd always been interested in film, a wide breadth of different genres and styles. And when Gus Van Sant started making his slower ‘following character' films with Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005), I just became enamoured with them. I always wondered how to convey that aesthetic in a more traditional genre fair. I sat on it for a while, and eventually, it turned into this.

It feels like we haven't had many fresh slasher stories of late and instead it's mostly been remakes and sequels in existing franchises. What was it that made you want to make a fresh slasher movie?

I think it's important to always try to do something new or something you haven't seen before. I also think there's a place for complete theft [laughs]. But I think that it's important for filmmakers and audiences to understand tropes and that they can be used to tell new stories. In A Violent Nature relies a lot on tropes. There's a lot of things in it that aren't original at all, but I feel like we're using those tropes to tell a story in a different way.

Were you cautious of how you would balance these conventional tropes and twists on them?

I do think it is pretty hard to balance. And I don't think that I was completely successful in a lot of ways. For instance, I wanted it to be like a slasher in every way, but from a different angle. Even the characters, you know, giving them kind of corny dialogue and trying to get them to act in a hyper-real way rather than naturally. Because of the different aesthetics of the film, I feel like maybe it doesn't quite balance out well with all the other peripheral characters. I was always aware of the balance and being cautious of it, and it tips one way more than the other sometimes, but that's all part of the process.

The film is brutal but also beautiful due to its location. What was it like filming on location and did it pose any problems?

Location was incredibly important for us. We wanted to make sure that the film was as aesthetically pleasing as much as possible. Even in some of the more brutal scenes we were like “What's the prettiest version of the shot? How do we make this a little more peaceful than it should be?”

The locations were incredibly remote in some instances so there are a lot of technical challenges with that. The most gruesome death in the film was in a very remote location where you had to go off a highway, onto a dirt road, then onto a logging road, then an ATV trail to get to where we needed to go. But in the end, I feel like it was the right thing to do.

People who have seen In A Violent Nature have already discussed the kill sequences. How did you bring them to life, and did you already have them planned before scouting for locations or did they come after you had the forest, logging setting?

I have a background in prosthetics and special effects, and my lead prosthetic special effects designer on the film, Steven Kostanski is a director as well. We kind of ping-ponged ideas back and forth when working on each other – I'm right now working on his remake of Roger Corman's Deathstalker. One of the things that we are always trying to do is come up with new ways to make deaths from a technical standpoint, and challenging ourselves to do something that we've never seen before. We look at what the specific engineering issues and filming issues could be. There's a lot of curiosity and how to pull something off – as well as sadistic inspiration.

For In A Violent Nature, I thought of the deaths first and then scouted a location that would fit that. I did have locations in mind, although none of them came to fruition. There were situations where we did have to augment the death scenes to fit, but nothing severe.

Another aspect of the film everyone is talking about is, of course, Ry Barrett as Johnny. How did he get involved with the project?

He's been a very familiar face within the Toronto genre scene for years and years now and he's a very accomplished actor within the scene, but we just hadn't crossed paths in a professional manner. We actually had four months or four weeks of principal photography that we ended up  scrapping before Ry came aboard. We found ourselves having to revisit the film after shooting between 75 and 80% of it already. One of the issues that we faced was our lead actor, the original Johnny, had a medical issue and was forced to quit the production. We realised even though he's in a full costume, the nuances to performance are so important – even just the gait and how the character holds their shoulders. everything was under a microscope – and you could tell when a different person was in the costume. So when we decided to reshoot the film and recast Johnny. We were thinking of actors, and we thought, “Ry is a great actor. Is he going to agree to the fact that we will never see his face and he doesn't have a line of dialogue?” And he was really game – he looked at it as a challenge and a way to exercise different muscles for his acting ability.

Johnny's design is really unique among the pantheon of horror monsters. How did you design what he'd look like?

I think everything by default that I write kind of takes place in the area that I grew up. So this one was taking place in the Northern Ontario location that I'm familiar with. I know with slashers they all have to have their own distinct mythology, and so I tried to tie that into the area instead of it being a summer camp or anything like that. Tying it in with the industry in the area – forestry is just a giant industry or at least it was in the area – was just a really easy jumping-off point for picking out his weapons. Even just the tangential factors tied to forestry like firefighting helped build our character.

Lastly, I want to know what's next for you, and could we see a return to the world of In A Violent Nature in future?

Right now I'm working on a few things. I tend not to talk about them too much because I feel like that's the easiest way to kill any enthusiasm for them in my head. So I tried to keep tight-lipped about it. But with the reception that the film's gotten so far, I have been thinking of a lot of different approaches that we could use to continue living in this world and to keep it not revisiting the same territory.

In A Violent Nature is released in UK cinemas on May 31.