In A Violent Nature Is Found Footage Minus The Found Footage

The horror movie In A Violent Nature puts a new spin on slasher movies, and its gimmick includes using the found footage template without any actual found footage.

The Story

The plot of In A Violent Nature sounds like a low-rent Friday the 13^th knock-off, with the movie following a group of young people camping in the woods and accidentally resurrecting the maniacal killer Johnny (Ry Barrett). What makes In A Violent Nature a wholly unique slasher movie is that it is told entirely through the eyes of its deformed, masked killer, following him from one gruesome murder to another, with the film only occasionally zeroing in on the campers themselves.

However, In A Violent Nature also does something even more unexpected in embodying quite possibly the first non-found footage found footage horror movie.

The Traditional Found Footage Format

Typically, found footage horror movies like The Blair Witch Project and genre franchises like Paranormal Activity and V/H/S follow a well-known set-up of a group of characters documenting some kind of unexplained or supernatural phenomena, with one character carrying the camera for most of the film.

Found footage movies also traditionally end with most or all the main characters being killed off by the monster or supernatural menace, with their footage later being discovered by someone else and forming the basis for the film. Hence the term “found footage”.

While In A Violent Nature has nary a camera to be seen, it still feels shockingly like a found footage movie because of how it is filmed and how Johnny’s killing spree in the woods unfolds.

Cinematic Techniques Of In A Violent Nature

Much of In A Violent Nature follows Johnny simply trudging through the wilderness from one horrific murder to another, with the camera frequently following Johnny from behind on his trek. Additionally, In A Violent Nature includes many long-take shots and scenes, particularly when it comes to Johnny’s pursuit of his victims, with the camera holding for extended periods until Johnny strikes.

Both of these are a staple of found footage horror movies, with long-take camerawork creating periods of suspense and tension in order to set up a jump-scare. Moreover, the camera lingering so much on Johnny as he simply walks through the forest has a distinctly found footage feel as if another character is walking right behind him throughout the film.

Found footage movies are also known to condense their narrative down to a relatively lean feature-length run time. Inevitably, the sheer amount of footage shot by the lost college students of The Blair Witch Project or the terrified New Yorkers in Cloverfield or Wikus and his team in District 9 would run for hours and include an abundance of irrelevant material. This is why jump cuts from one scene to the next are seen so much in found footage movies, in the interest of the movie simply getting to the point.

In A Violent Nature takes place over what roughly appears to be a weekend, and like a found footage movie, it simplifies its format with frequent jump cuts, often cutting down the time it takes for Johnny to walk through the forest with the time of day changing quite noticeably with each cut. As the movie becomes more focused on its young protagonists, it also implements jump cuts to keep their efforts to escape Johnny down to their essentials.

The ultimate kicker, however, is that, like a found footage horror movie, In A Violent Nature includes no musical score. In the case of found footage movies, the absence of a score is intended to make the crude footage look and feel that much more authentic to real life, and the lack of a score has a similar effect on In A Violent Nature of making the movie seem eerily real.

At the premiere party for In A Violent Nature #Sundance2024 pic.twitter.com/DcLOhMLZVG

— Kate Sánchez ➡️ SGF (@OhMyMithrandir) January 23, 2024

A New Genre

The concept of the found footage sub-genre of horror, by its very nature, would seem to suggest that any found footage movie will always have to operate within very specific parameters to tell its story and jolt its audience with maximum scares. However, In A Violent Nature shows that the rules of found footage aren’t set in stone, taking everything that makes effective found footage horror movies scary, jettisoning the found footage from it, and proving every bit as effective as found footage horror at is scariest.

Do you agree? Is In A Violent Nature a found footage film? Also, check out our articles on the 5 rules of horror movies and 10 extremely disturbing horror movies.

Watch the trailer for the horror film below.