‘In a Violent Nature’ Is the Unofficial ‘Friday the 13th’ Remake You’ve Been Waiting For

Few slasher movies have enjoyed the kind of consistent success of the Friday the 13th series. They may never have earned as much money, critical attention, or cult appreciation as entries in the Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street franchises. Without that kind of prestige, the movies concerning the repetitive exploits of one hulking undead monster Jason Voorhees (as well as, in the original movie, his mother; and, occasionally, replacement hockey-masked figures) were free to revel in their constant, near-clockwork presence at the 1980s multiplex. Almost every year of that decade, usually in the spring but occasionally in August, a new Friday the 13th movie would emerge, gross the contemporary equivalent of around $50 million, and beat a hasty retreat into the woods, or the lake, or whatever outdoorsy environs Jason descended into. Even the meticulous planning of Jigsaw himself couldn’t get the Saw series to eight installments in under a decade.

It’s remarkable, then, that Friday the 13th also counts as the longest-dormant major slasher franchise in the business. Halloween and Scream have had big, recent hits. Saw is back, with an eleventh movie planned for 2025. Chainsaw Massacres turn up every few years. Hell, even Jason’s fellow ’80s refugee Freddy Krueger had a slightly more recent remake, with the 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street versus the 2009 Friday the 13th redo. The latter was a sizable hit, so why haven’t we seen Jason in a movie (or even a TV show) in 15 years?

The basic answer is rights issues; the sneaky answer is that there’s sort of a new one in theaters right now. Let’s tackle the basic answer first, though: As recently reported by the good folks at Fangoria, there has been movement on Jason-related projects – mostly in the wrong direction. Crystal Lake, an A24 TV series from Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller, recently went back to the drawing board after sacking Fuller (who was the main reason to be excited about it). Separately, a company called Horror Inc. recently announced a “Jason Universe” that would include projects both specific (games, merchandise) and vague (“entertainment”), but not any movies or TV shows.

This is because New Line Cinema holds the trademark for the title Friday the 13th, while Horror Inc. control the rights to the characters and materials from various sequels, and original screenwriter Victor Miller owns the right to his screenplay for the first film. Any new Jason movie would require some degree of negotiation, though original director Sean Cunningham, as reported by Fangoria, thinks that studio reluctance poses more of an obstacle than legal conflicts. (It can’t help, though, can it?)

The alternative might be better, anyway: In a Violent Nature, an indie horror movie hitting theaters ahead of its Shudder debut (and following news of vomit-inducing gore!), is essentially the Friday the 13th reboot no one ever bothered to make. It’s a movie about a hulking, undead monster-man of seemingly limited cognitive capacity, stalking and killing people in the woods while wearing a mask. (One that looks a bit more like the mask from My Bloody Valentine, but still.) The difference is that writer-director Chris Nash doesn’t follow the group of young people who are brutally picked off one by one – at least not closely. Instead, Nash mostly keeps his camera close to Johnny (Ry Barrett), the killer, from his creepily unceremonious rise from the damp, leaf-strewn earth to his walk-and-stalk sessions through the Canadian woods. With a few key exceptions, what we see and hear of the other characters is limited to what Johnny might spy from his concealed vantage point.

This makes In a Violent Nature sound a bit like a first-person videogame – a Hardcore Henry for the slasher crowd. But Nash doesn’t use many actual POV shots. More often, the camera follows Johnny, lurking in sync while observing him, too. No musical score provides the requisite stings; instead, the movie is soundtracked by the cricks and cracks of breaking twigs, the ambient noise of a walk in the woods. It strips the slasher movie down to its essence, and then inverts it. Nash has cited as an influence the Gus Van Sant “death trilogy” of Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, which also feature various combinations of nature, doominess, and following shots.

Compared to those movies, or even the artier end of contemporary horror, In a Violent Nature might not measure up. Though its verdant tones might aesthetically resemble what some David Gordon Green fans probably pictured when they first heard he was making Halloween sequels, it lacks Green’s ear for funny yet naturalistic dialogue and his affectionate eye for pockets of community that sprout from a post-industrial landscape. The technique of introducing characters via snatches of overheard conversation holds a lot of promise that Nash doesn’t fully capitalize on. With so much exposition left offscreen, the movie invites speculation about its victims’ various relationships without ever zeroing in anything particularly interesting or authentically observant. They’re still just banal cannon fodder for some truly gnarly gore, in a movie that saves some of its methodical qualities for the “kills” – including one so viciously over-the-top that it starts to unexpectedly compete with a Terrifier sequel in the middle of all this quasi-Malickian woodsiness.

Yet whether intentionally or not, this half-arthouse, half-gorehound quality feels true to the spirit of the original Friday the 13th. At the time, it was a cheaper, gorier Halloween knockoff, and it still is. But with the passage of time, a low-tech celluloid-shot slasher movie set in the woods takes on a certain evocative grit. The first movie is set largely on a rainy night, with counselors setting up at Camp Crystal Lake before any kids are there, with bits and pieces of old living quarters scattered within the inky blackness. While it would be a stretch to call Sean Cunningham’s direction “atmospheric” by the standards of John Carpenter, the movie does feel more tactile and less self-consciously slick than, say, the 2009 remake, which is probably “better” from a sheerly technical standpoint while blending in too easily with that particular 2000s horror-remake sensibility.

Like both movies entitled Friday the 13th, In a Violent Nature contains little human insight – and may be all the more memorable for it. Though it’s not an official remake, it often plays a voyeuristic dream of one. That’s especially true in its unsettling final passage, where a Final Girl appears uncertain how or if she might wake from it – a drawn-out version of the was-it-a-dream ambiguity that accompanies the first appearance of Jason in the original Friday. What was once an odd but compelling muddle becomes, in Nash’s hands, a source of sustained tension. It’s hard to imagine the merchandise or “immersive experiences” planned for Jason Voorhees working quite so well as this back-to-basics reimagining.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.