Podcast: ‘In a Violent Nature’ Gets Uncertified

When you set out to make a slasher, do you honor the movies that inspired you or set out to do something new? Horror has always existed in tension with itself, and slashers in particular can offer deceptively treacherous footing for ambitious filmmakers. So when In a Violent Nature, the debut feature from writer-director Chris Nash, blew the doors off the genre, we knew we needed to talk about it on our biweekly half-hour Uncertified series at Certified Forgotten.

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It takes a special sort of person to pocket a personal belonging from a grave site. So when a group of twenty-something campers steal the locket from the grave of Johnny, the region’s most notorious serial killer, his sudden reincarnation feels like the horrible hand of fate. In a Violent Nature adopts a naturalistic aesthetic, following Johnny through the woods as he seeks revenge. Along the way, the hapless campers will learn the true history of Johnny – and the sacrifices the community made to put him in that grave to begin with.

In this short excerpt from the episode, Matthew Monagle explains why In a Violent Nature reminds him of a very specific type of Alaskan literature:

"Every person my family had a copy of Alaska Bear Tales, or More Alaska Bear Tales, which is a very Alaska thing (...) They were all stories about people who survived a bear attack, and they were horrifying when you're nine years old and reading how somebody's flesh was torn away from their face and now they had to play dead. But all of the books after the fact were them (...) trying to understand why they survived or how they survived or why it all mattered."

The In a Violent Nature mini-episode of the Certified Forgotten podcast is now available to stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or the podcast platform of your choice.