The Circle of Death
Eco-Horror Themes from 'In a Violent Nature'
Hi y’all, just wanted to preface this by saying that this will be my last of these biweekly essays for a while. (Don’t worry, I’m definitely not slowing down on interviews. Lots of exciting ones to come this year!) I’m about to move into my first house and need to dedicate time to the move, home repairs, and getting settled (and gardening!). After that, I want to shift focus to my fiction. I spend so much time reading and writing about other people’s stories, it’s time that I devote more energy to my own. I have a few short fiction pieces that I really want to polish up and get out on submissions this summer—fingers crossed!
I still want to discuss the books I’m reading and movies I’m watching, so the first Monday in July, I’ll be sharing a wrap-up of all the books I read in June that are related to veganism and animal rights. (It’s been a busy reading month, so there’s a lot to share!) I may still drop an essay every now and then if something feels prescient, and I have lots of ideas to write about in the future—the prominence of animals in cozy mysteries, the symbolism of rabbits, how fiction feeds our cheese addiction, to name a few.
That’s it for now, so let’s get into today’s topic.
For a movie where not much really happens, it has a lot to say. If you’re unfamiliar with horror’s sleeper hit of 2024, In a Violent Nature isn’t too different from any Friday the 13th sequel: a group of young adults goes into the woods and remove a golden locket from an old shed, accidentally awakening an undead killer who proceeds to murder them in ridiculously grotesque fashion. After recovering his locket, he returns to the earth, at peace. But that’s where the similarities end. Rather than follow the victims, we watch from the killer’s perspective as he picks his next targets. Doing so takes away the usual slasher spooks, and we must sit and think about the violence we’re anticipating.
If you haven’t watched the movie, I won’t be going much into the plot (scant as it is).1 Instead, I want to discuss how, in just the first 20 minutes, the film successfully subverts a pernicious trope of the slasher subgenre.
The First Animal
The Final Girl is the term used to describe the protagonist in slasher films, the last woman standing, the one who (usually) survives the killer’s attacks and defeats him. The First Animal is a term I created to describe the phenomenon of animals being the first victims of horror movies, killed solely to foreshadow the terror to come. (You can read more about this in “First Animals & Final Girls.”)
A Blaze of Gory
After our murderous protagonist, Johnny, awakens, he begins his walk through the wilderness in search of the locket his future victims stole. We’re only six minutes in when Johnny hears the soft buzz of flies picking over the partially mummified body of an animal. In most other slashers, the undead killer would’ve been the culprit in this situation, leaving a conspicuous corpse in his wake to alert the group of protagonists that they may be in danger. But not here—this time it’s the everyman who so callously kills the First Animal.
The camera offers a close-up of the leg-hold trap around the animal’s foot, then pans up to show a game cam attached to a tree overlooking the grisly scene. Like the audience hungrily watching each kill, whoever put up that camera is similarly voyueristic, choosing to watch the animal slowly, painfully die rather than releasing them or putting them out of their misery.
Above the game cam, a pink flag is tied around the tree trunk. Johnny follows a trail of pink out of the woods and into a clearing where the man who laid the trap, Chuck, lives. In the distance, we hear a park ranger yelling at him to stop putting traps in the forest.
Once the ranger leaves, Johnny chases—though can it really be called a chase if he’s only walking?—Chuck back into the woods. And if he hadn’t stumbled into one of his own snares, Chuck could have escaped. After an off-screen kill, Johnny leaves the man’s corpse behind, thus concluding the movie’s opening kill sequence in the same way it began: with flies buzzing over a corpse. As Johnny walks on, we’re left thinking how similar bodies are. Whether we’re man or beast, bugs devour us all the same in the end.
Kill the Forest for the Trees
The film plays with the cyclical nature of violence quite a bit. The tagged trees Johnny follows symbolize man’s violence against nature. Whether it means the trees are destined for the ax or are simply part of Chuck’s property, they chop up the forest into sectors, thereby giving humans the ability to mold it into a version suitable more for ourselves than for the animals who live there. It also harkens back to Johnny’s initial death, when the area was used for logging. While the wanton destruction of 70 years ago may be ancient history, humans haven’t stopped interfering with these woods. Even the film’s title alludes to this, that the movie takes place, quite literally, in a violent nature.
The film also speaks to the violence of human nature. Even though Johnny and Chuck are very different—one being an undead mass-murderer, the other just a regular dude—they both kill indiscriminately. Leg-hold traps have come under fire from animal advocates for precisely this reason. Trappers have no way of knowing what species of animal—including humans—may walk into their traps, and there’s no way to prevent unwanted species from accidentally getting ensnared. The animal that died in Chuck’s trap could’ve been a fox or a wolf, or they could’ve been someone’s precious pooch. Captured animals can spin around for days before they’re killed by predators or die from their injuries. Like glue traps, they sometimes even gnaw at their limbs to free themselves.
One could argue that Johnny is less of a monster than Chuck. Johnny simply wants to retrieve what was stolen from him, whereas Chuck’s motivations are less clear. He may be killing animals for money, or for food or fur. He could also be a sicko who enjoys watching animals suffer.
It’s very possible that Chuck could’ve one day reformed his ways and stopped slaughtering woodland critters—a living man can, theoretically, be reasoned with—but Johnny kills him before he ever gets that chance.
Johnny, on the other hand, has no conscience, no thought for his victims. While he is typical of slasher killers, in that he seemingly feels no emotion or empathy, the fact that he keeps finding new ways to slaughter each victim indicates some level of enjoyment or entertainment in the killing itself. Viewers must wonder why they are similarly entertained by his violent acts.
The Final Girl
The movie ends with a different kind of First Animal when the Final Girl tells her rescuer that what attacked her “was an animal” rather than a person. The woman—interesting how the story began in death with two men, yet ends in survival with two women—tells a story of her brother going through a similar experience in the woods 30 years ago. He also spoke of an animal—a bear—attacking him. The story comes full circle, beginning with an animal’s killing and ending with an animal blamed for killing humans. Who knows, that may even be the reason why Chuck puts out so many traps despite repeated admonitions by the park rangers. Johnny’s revenge may be quelled, but the cycle of violence continues.
The Faulty Idea
I was pretty shocked that I liked this movie; I hadn’t even planned on watching it until I heard some good reviews. (Though even then I was suspicious.) Yet for all the praise I’ve just bestowed on it, I also have a small nit to pick. The fact that I could talk this much about the movie without discussing most of the plot shows that the First Animal trope wasn’t subverted as progressively as I’d’ve liked. An animal still dies, offscreen, at the very beginning, and this opening sequence has no bearing on the rest of the story. Therefore, the animal’s death is still being used as a primer to prepare the audience for the gnarly human deaths—that is, the more significant deaths—to come later on. Since the audience is already prepared for wanton murder and gore when sitting down to watch a slasher film, it’s past time to retire this trope.
The Final Point
There’s a meta element to this story, as well. The violence we consume in stories influences the violence we perpetrate in real life. We watch movies in which animals are eaten, worn, and exploited in numerous ways, and we rarely, if ever, are exposed to stories that challenge preconceived notions about how we should interact with other animals in our daily lives.
Now, when I talk about all this, I don’t mean to say that animals deserve equal representation in films. I’m human, so I enjoy movies about other humans. I’d just like to see writers put in more effort when they’re creating (and killing) animal characters.
Someday, I think they will.
On my mind: Into the Deep (2025)
Why are there so many shark attack movies? And why can’t I stop watching them? They’re almost always bad, and yet they never go out of style.
Like most modern shark movies, Into the Deep really has nothing to say regarding shark behavior or conservation. It simply uses sharks as a scare tactic, luring naive viewers like myself into its cold embrace by dangling horror icons like Scout Taylor-Compton and Richard Dreyfuss in front of me. Well, a big thumbs down.
If you’d like to watch just this part of the movie to have a better understanding of what I’m talking about, it’s available on Shudder and has no on-screen violence.