31 Days of Halloween: In a Violent Nature

2024, Chris Nash (ABCs of Death 2: Z is for Zygote) -- Shudder

This was one of the first movies I downloaded for the season, made moot by the fact we activated Shudder powers, but the last movie we actually watched. I heard it was a deconstruction of the slasher-in-the-woods (aka, the Friday the 13th / Jason Voorhees template) but it was less deconstructed, as it was stripped down and mostly from another viewpoint (aka, the slasher). 

I rather liked it.

Somewhere in Northern Ontario some stupid kids from the city are wandering around in the woods. They come across a ramshackle falling down... something and are talking off camera about stuff when one notices a necklace hanging from a pipe. He takes it and they depart.

The ground begins to burble and shift and a massive figure climbs out, shaking the soil from his shoulders. The Antagonist immediately sets off in... a random direction? Or is he being drawn to the necklace? The forest is ... beautiful? This is not the eerie forest of 21st century horror movies, no tall stark trees draped in spanish moss, no dead undergrowth and cold mists. Its quite lovely -- wild flowers and chirping birds. This is the wood you would wander with no worries of machete carrying freaks wearing hockey masks, even if it is Canada.

The Antagonist's (Ry Barrett, The Hyperborean) first stop is a poacher's place. We hear the argument between the Park Ranger and the poacher long before the shambling monster wanders into the guy's yard; we won't begrudge him being the first gruesome death. But no stupid kids, no necklace, so back into the woods.

And that's how the movie goes. We literally are following the killer as he makes his way through the long trek, finally drawn to where his totem is being held. The stupid kids joke with each other, tell each other tales, tell camp fire stories about the killer known to be in these woods, from some 70 years ago.

And then he starts killing them. But with patience, with graduated ferocity as these movies were always wont to do. The movie is not breaking new ground on the style for it is all horrific, unwarranted and terrible but how they choose to tell the story is ... interesting? I mean, there is already an assumption of some "enjoyment" to this sub-genre of horror, so I applaud the exploration. And its not overly festooned with extras, no useless adornments or shocking plot twists. He is a dead killer, who had shoddy reasons, and there is no reason why he keeps on coming back from the dead to kill again, nor why he also can be killed... well, kind of. 

In the end there is a Final Girl, as there always is. And only after she actually escapes the antagonist did I actually feel any sense of fear. She may be far away from him, far away from the gruesome deaths of all her friends and lover, she may be safe inside the vehicle of someone who picked her up on an empty road, but she is... utterly traumatized. And we know, we feel, we fear that the killer could appear at any moment. And we are afraid. Utterly.

This movie is like a study of these types of slasher movies, but in narrative form. In presenting each of the sub-genre's tropes it is commenting on them and their use in the movies that follow it. The mask, the weapons, the "creative kill", that the isolated wilderness should be inherently scary, that callousness carries karmic response from the universe and sometimes the universe is murderous. But the fun bit it carries through the movie is that the wilderness may be wild and terrible, but it is still so... beautiful.

Well, except for the black flies... the little black flies, picking your bones.