Cody Parish
WARNING: This essay contains plot spoilers!
The killer’s point-of-view (POV) shot is arguably the most recognizable convention of the slasher film.1 Made famous in the opening sequence of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the killer’s lurking POV shot has been reproduced in countless subsequent slasher franchises as a means to build suspense. It is noticeably absent, however, from Shudder’s new independent release, In a Violent Nature (Chris Nash, 2024), a slasher movie whose central conceit entails taking the perspective of its killer.2 in her seminal monograph, Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992, 2015), Carol J. Clover was the first to challenge gendered arguments claiming male and female viewers of the slasher film identify with the male killer and Final Girl, respectively. Instead, Clover argues that viewers identify initially with the slasher killer until more details about the Final Girl are known, at which point viewer identification, prompted by cinematography as much as by narrative development, begins to shift to the Final Girl (45). Of the killer, Clover writes, “[He] is often unseen or barely glimpsed, during the first part of the film, and what we do see, when we finally get a good look, hardly invites immediate or conscious empathy,” noting the killer is typically “masked” or “deformed” (44).
Yet, what distinguishes In a Violent Nature from previous slashers exploring the killer’s perspective, like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), is that the film almost exclusively tracks the footsteps of its killer, Johnny (Ry Barrett), who becomes the narrative’s anti-hero as a result, while all other characters including the narrative’s Final Girl receive little backstory or development. The filmmakers strategically employ various cinematographic and narrative techniques to dehumanize and humanize Johnny as the de facto protagonist, oscillating between identificatory distance and proximity. Johnny explicitly embodies an ambivalent tension between revulsion and sympathy, one that has implicitly framed intellectually disabled slasher killers like Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974-2022) franchise and Jason Voorhees of the Friday the 13th (1980-2009) film series. In a Violent Nature thus challenges viewers to reconsider the dread of neurological difference connected to the killer in the slasher film.
