'In a Violent Nature,' Form, Content, and What it Means to Call Someone "NPC"

Maybe I'm overthinking a slasher film

Real quick. I’m excruciatingly close to 200 subscribers and all my future hopes and dreams rest on this, I’m embarrassed to admit. It’s all free. I don’t even ask you to “buy me a coffee” yet (because I don’t know how that works).

It pains me to admit that I went to see In a Violent Nature mostly out of obligation. I feel a duty to see newly released horror films when they make the local theater, just to encourage future screenings of my beloved genre.

In a Violent Nature (2024): Distributed by IFC Films and Shudder

(I suppose that this is how partisan politics work as well).

Anyhow, it felt like an obligation to me for two reasons:

1). The slasher film has never been my favorite genre. I have enjoyed many of them over the years, but that has not been the case for many more. Sadism for its own sake is a trap and many slashers fall for it, and I don’t think this necessarily brings out the best in human beings.

2). I don't have the stomach for wildly explicit violence. And this film was marketed as a kind of spectacle of such violence, what with the stories of people vomiting during previews and all.

Imagine my relief when I exited the theater having legitimately loved this movie. It's both artistically inventive and genuinely thought-provoking; a pleasant surprise to this horror film buff. Director Chris Nash has really done a lot on a tiny budget.

Let me address the violence first. Yes there are scenes of unbelievable violence, impressive in its very inventiveness. People will be discussing the killing of a Yoga practitioner by that lake for years to come.

Yet somehow the violence did not really bother me in this film and I think the reasons behind that paradox are worth exploring and related to why the movie is great.

First of all, the violence is strategically employed; there is a restraint here that is surprising (and probably why some slasher nuts dismiss the movie as “boring” — an attitude that usually marks the accuser as the boring one, as I’ve written about before).

Not every death is as gruesome as the few that will get the media attention. And nearly half of the killings are done off screen. In fact, those unseen murders are interestingly just as effective (or should I say 'affective?') as the highly creative and explicit ones.

But there is another reason that the violence (though shocking and cruel) is not sickening, and that reason has to do with the formal, creative choices the filmmakers employ in the style and narrative perspective they've committed to. By the end of this piece, I hope to convince you that this movie makes a moral point (intentional or not) that is really worth thinking about.

The “Plot”

I know that horror films aren't everyone's cup of tea, so I'll cover the plot very briefly, which is easy, since there is not much of a plot to cover. The filmmakers basically asked the question, “what would the Friday the 13th franchise be like if it were told from Jason's perspective?” Then they made that movie.

In this case, Jason is named Johnny, who was killed not by horny camp counselor neglect but by some manual laborers' resentment of their bosses. But even this basic plot information has to be inferred from bits and pieces of dialogue that we drift in and out of throughout the film. There is no narrative perspective in the movie. There is only the actions of Johnny. And we simply follow behind him as he takes these actions.

From the minute his corpse rises from the grave after his mother's necklace is taken from it, most of the movie is us trailing behind the powerful, reanimated ghoul as he wanders through the forest killing everyone that he comes across.

Style, narrative perspective, form/content

We mostly follow Johnny from behind, like we're playing a first-person shooter video game. I believe this formal choice makes the brutality of the killings less disturbing than I was expecting. We have not followed or gotten to know anyone who is murdered, therefore they seem somehow less real. These victims come across our path (as do their conversations, which we drift in and out of) just as they come across Johnny's path.

Stop calling people “NPCs”

I hate to say this, but these campers’ deaths are less disturbing because the film's limited narrative perspective has encouraged us to see the people just as Johnny does, as meat. They are, to use a term I hear too often, NPCs (non-player characters). They don't really matter.

The campers lack of reality changes (in a Hitchcockian way) for the last 20 minutes or so of the film, when we abruptly start following the film's final girl, the sole survivor of the massacre, as she escapes and is picked up by a woman in truck. To be honest, those final 20 minutes were by far the most terrifying of the film's runtime as we have no idea whether Johnny will return for a final kill. The film's narrative perspective has left him by then and attached to a sympathetic victim and we can finally feel something.

Since Hitchcock (and Rashomon), the technique of playing with narrative perspective has been a go-to idea for generations of film school students. But I can't remember a film that employed it so well as this one for ages. And I can't help think that this wasn't just for show.

There's some real wisdom in this merging of form and content here, and it all goes back to the idea of the NPC I mentioned above. Hearing that term so jokingly and careless tossed about in contemporary discourse is unspeakably ugly.

Of course, on a level of evolutionary psychology, we can't possibly treat every single person as a "thou," rather than an "it." We would not be able to function under that moral weight. But to flippantly accept other people as "NPCs," that is to say, objects in our path, is a social nightmare and we should at least feel guilty about doing it.

When I hear people write other people off like this, I get angry. And the internet and social media encourage nothing so much as this attitude toward others. I have no idea whether the filmmakers had any of this in mind when they decided to make a brilliant arthouse version of Friday the 13th, but these are the thoughts I came away with as I pondered why I wasn't more disgusted by the slaughter it depicts.

I'm not saying that I enjoyed the killing (though, let's be honest, the murder by the lake was so outrageous I almost applauded). But I was not disturbed by it either. The fact that this slasher movie got me thinking about the implications of my reaction is a testament to its excellence.