by Emily Maesar, Associate TV Editor

In a Violent Nature is a Canadian horror movie that follows a killer who is raised from his resting place when the object keeping him locked in the ground, his mother’s necklace, is taken. It’s largely a quiet film that ends up showing off the beautiful, but eerie, Ontario wilderness as we watch the resurrected Johnny (Ry Barrett) walk. Because aside from the splashy moments of slasher gore, Johnny does a lot of walking.

From the moment the necklace is taken by a group of friends who are exploring an abandoned fire tower, Johnny is bound and determined to get the necklace back, eventually finding the group of friends who took it and killing them off one by one. Once the group is down by more than half, they find a ranger (Reece Presley) at the park ranger station and he impresses the severity, and truth, of the story their very dead friend told them at the campfire. Johnny finds them, though, as he always does. However, because it's a slasher film in the vein of Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, one of the friends survives (Final Girl material, of course) and is left with the horrible thought after it seems to be over and she’s saved: what if he’s still out there?

For the release of the Collector’s Edition of the film, MovieJawn’s Associate TV Editor, Emily Maesar, sat down with the film’s editor, Alex Jacobs, to talk about what it was like making the film and what the reception has been like.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. This interview also contains minor spoilers for the film. A previous version of this post was only a preview. It now features the full article.

Emily Maesar: On the special edition of the In a Violent Nature Blu-Ray, there’s a feature-length documentary about the first time writer/director Chris Nash tried to make this movie?

Alex Jacobs: Yeah! Pierce Derks, the cinematographer, shot that and is editing that because he was the BTS photographer on their first attempt at making the movie, when it was a different cinematographer.

EM: Sounds crazy! (Laughs)

AJ: Yeah. (Laughs) I haven’t even watched it yet, but I’m excited to. I edited three of the special features for the Blu-Ray, but that one was all his. He’s just been sitting on just like Terry Gilliam-esque footage like Lost in La Mancha. It’s fun to talk about now, and to look at now, because there was a happy ending to it. If it had never actually been pulled off, then this would be a much sadder documentary probably.

But you know, it’s crazy because no producer would ever want to hear this, but it was the right move. Like, I’ve seen the footage, it was the right move to reshoot the whole movie. And obviously, it paid off, which is nuts. (Laughs) And you would never imagine that would be the outcome.

EM: Right. (Laughs) I assume that you weren’t working with them during that first one?

AJ: No, yeah. Because you know the weather. Winter came, so they weren’t able to try again until the following summer. They brought me on that spring, and I was up for a few weeks, like three or four weeks, I got to hang out on set—which was great. I live close enough that it wasn’t a hard drive for me, so I just went up and hung out.

I’m glad I did that because I felt like a part of it. I’ve had other experiences where you just get all of the footage after the fact, and you kind of feel like an alien to this whole thing and don’t get it. But I felt like I knew, like I got to meet the cast and they’re a lovely group of people. And I got to see, literally see, the materials being gathered that I was gonna work with. So it was great! I don’t usually get that experience as an editor, but it was really cool.

EM: And obviously, you’re right that it paid off. This movie has been a pretty big hit, especially for how small a budget it had. Shudder’s big! Like, that’s such a good platform for this film.

AJ: I’ll speak for myself, but I kind of always thought it would be this niche thing. (Laughs) I’ve loved the project since they told me about it but I was like, “This is gonna be one of those weird cult things that like 1 out of 10 people likes, but I’m one of the 10.”

So I was happy with that. And then yeah, it got into Sundance, and it was like, “Oh, they want to give it a wider release”, and just been watching it kind of snowball. But I don’t think I was wrong in assessing that it wouldn’t be for everyone. (Laughs)

EM: Sure, yeah. (Laughs)

AJ: I wasn’t prepared for so many people to embrace it, which has been amazing.

EM: Yeah, and I think that part of that is definitely that the kills are insane. You guys just won a Chainsaw Award for the yoga kill, after all.

AJ: Yeah, we did. Very proud of that!

EM: It’s such a deranged wonderful scene. And a gasp-y scene. I saw it in a theater in Los Angeles, in a pretty packed theater. Obviously it’s a slow movie otherwise until you hit the kills, which you know, you’re getting atmosphere and vibes, but like, that [the yoga kill] and the ranger station wood cutting scene really had a lot of reaction.

AJ: That’s great to hear! ‘Cause yeah, I’ve gotten that reaction from that ranger one, where people are like, that felt long, and we’re like, yeah. (Laughs)

EM: It’s brutal. Obviously, it’s on purpose. It’s supposed to be brutal and drawn out.

AJ: It’s funny. It’s one of those movies where sometimes you hear a complaint about it, where someone is just accurately assessing what the movie is doing. Like, yes, well.

EM: I saw that Chris Nash had said in an interview that he wanted to treat it like a nature documentary, which is such a great assessment of what you guys ended up creating. It really does feel like that. I was curious what that kind of conversation, you were on set for some of it, but was that part of the conversation that you guys were having in the editorial room about how the pacing should be. Nature documentary, or were there other like points of reference he was making to the pace and stuff?

AJ: Yes, I mean, there was a lot of that, certainly, but it was also at a certain point, you feel it out, and a movie has to be its own thing. But yes, that was definitely brought up quite a bit, wanting to feel like a nature documentary. I was very obsessed with kind of the more arthousey inspirations that Chris had mentioned.

He brought up Elephant and other Gus Van Sant movies. I loved Last Days, which I had never seen until I got this job, and I was like, I guess I have to watch that one Van Sant movie I’ve never seen, and then I ended up watching it like 6 times. I really loved it, and it’s one of those movies too, where theoretically, nothing necessarily happens until the end, but it’s following a subject. So, that was big for me.

I’m also a huge fan of the Pablo Lorrain movies Jackie and Spencer. To me, those were touchstones for it. That’s only me speaking for myself and, obviously, I’m not the director of the movie. One thing that has really lingered in my mind, especially in seeing people react to it is that there’s all these things it’s supposed to be. “Oh, it’s slow cinema,” or “Oh, it’s gonna be this or that.” And I think that we really, at a certain point, found ourselves in uncharted territory, in terms of pacing.

‘Cause it’s actually kind of not that slow. (Laughs) It’s made with the intention to feel slow, but if you really stopwatch it with the movie, it’s actually not that slow from set piece to set piece. Like it doesn’t spend that much time on average. There is some, that shot of him walking that’s about 97 seconds long, that comes right after the yoga kill, that was one that I was particularly fond of and I wanted that to be as long as possible.

EM: Yeah, that one rules.

AJ: We kind of couldn’t do that with most of the walking footage, for various reasons, but I was like, we really need to have one shot that just feels like, “Wow, this is still going.” And that’s not even that long. I mean, you start to feel that way a minute into that minute and a half shot, but yes, you go in with all these intentions and inspirations. At a certain point, you’re just like inside of what the movie’s gonna be. And that’s it’s own thing.

That’s how I felt seeing reviews of it that are kind of wishing it was something else, like a different movie entirely. Like, “Oh I thought this was gonna be more of a traditional slasher” or the opposite, “Oh, I thought this was gonna be more of a slow thing.” It’s kind of its own weird little thing and I’m proud of it for that reason. I think that’s why it’s kind of good in the long run that we frustrated some people. That’s the cost of making something interesting. (Laughs)

EM: I know you were saying that there were issues on why you couldn’t hold on shots so, I imagine, that’s probably why you end up doing a lot of match cutting, plus it’s always good to cut around, you know? But I think the match cutting is so good, and mixed with this very powerful sound design, it creates such a great package.

AJ: At a certain phase of the edit, like you do the initial one, and it’s just the secret to editing—this is the thing—the terrible secret (Laughs), is that it just takes pass after pass. At a certain point, at the end, it starts to feel like you’re that picture of Leonardo Dicaprio as Howard Hughes with his hands on the plane. Like, okay, “Am I bumping on any of these cuts?” You just want it to flow as smoothly as possible.

And yeah, I got to that place with this movie and at a certain point, editing a movie, you just begin to forget what a movie even is. Like, you kinda lose track. I always try to watch at least part of a movie every night—like throw a DVD in and watch something. Just to remind myself like what a movie is. Sometimes you have to watch the scene in Alien with the headless Ash robot, the cut from the model head to the actor head, to remember that they got away with that. And that’s one of the most successful movies ever made. There is stuff that you will hate about your own work and then you watch something else and you’re like, “Oh, actually, no. It’s fine. Movies do shit like that.” (Laughs)

EM: And to that effect, I think the practical effects are so good and I’m curious what it was like? I dunno if this is silly, but what is it like to get that footage and does it work initially? Like, how much are you having to really play with making it work, from both the point-of-view as an audience member, but also hiding any of the imperfections that come along with doing practical work?

AJ: Yeah, I mean this was my first time cutting something with this much practical effects work and it was interesting. To say the least.

You’re given a lot of help by people’s squeamishness. You obsess over this thing frame-by-frame and then you go watch people watch it in a theater and half the time they’re not looking at the screen. So, that does you a lot of favors. But yeah, again, I think it’s about making the cuts flow and just making it feel like a continuous experience. You know, from here to here to here, as like a series of bullet point information. Just ratcheting that up. I don’t know how to put it into words really, but it was a very, very interesting experience, learning on that. I hope to do it again with that much practical effects.

EM: That’s fair. I’m also curious—how much coverage did they actually shoot? Obviously, we see what we see, but I’m curious how much of it is actually there. Obviously, you’re kind of massaging where you’re cutting and, like, the angles you’re cutting to, but how much coverage did you have to actually play with?

AJ: Not a lot. (Laughs) I mean, this movie didn’t have that much money and Chris knows what he wants. So, it wasn’t like he’d shoot a scene from a bunch of different angles and then be like, “It’s good that we have that.” It’s funny, when we were in the feedback stage, we were getting notes from people, or suggestions, and they would always ask, “Do you have any coverage of this or that?” And the answer was always no. “Oh, what if you use more footage of this, if you have it.” “No, we don’t.”

There’s not that many dialogue heavy scenes in the movie—or at least not that many that are presented the way traditional dialogue scenes are presented. The conversation at the end of the movie did feel out of the ordinary in the process because that had some amount of coverage. But for the rest of it, especially the kill scenes, Chris knew what he wanted and he knew what a scene needed. And he would know, like, “Oh, I need this insert shot of this.” One of the last shots we got for the movie was him, which he shot in a backyard, was the shot of the neck bone popping in the yoga kill. It’s a close up of the neck and that always gets a huge reaction every time I watch the movie with a crowd. That shot always gets people. And he knew he needed that. Like we had a version of the scene at that point that was not as good, but it was passable. And he obviously saw it and knew, or has known all along, that we did need that insert—that we needed that extreme close-up of a bone popping. And it punches the sequence up like crazy, that just added so much when we dropped it in.

EM: With the reaction, what has that been like? I know you said it’s kind of been some time since you finished it, but obviously it came out this year. Both theatrically and digitally, but now it’s getting a physical home release. What has that been like? You guys even just won a Chainsaw Award. Huge congratulations! But you’re getting recognition from the horror community in a big way. Fangoria is huge, like I have one next to me.

AJ: Yeah and there’s an interview with Chris in one. They talk about us in Fangoria! That’s amazing. I’ll speak for myself, but yeah, I never imagined it would be this visible. I figured it was gonna be something that ended up on streaming and I’d be proud of it and I’d tell people, “Oh, there’s this movie.” And now, I don’t really have to. Like, people have heard of it, generally. Which is very strange for me, but it’s been great.

I went down to Chicago to see it at The Music Box, which is the theater I lived down the street from during college and it's one of my favorite movie theaters in the world. I got Q&A’d there and I watched it with that crowd and it was amazing. They screened it here at the Wisconsin Film Festival, in my hometown. That was crazy. People have actually watched it, which is wild to me. It screened at the movie theater I worked as a teenager. Believe me, it’s my first movie—my first feature as a solo editor—and I feel very spoiled now. I think not every experience is gonna be like this, but this one was really something. It’s been really lovely.

Check out Alex Jacobs’ website to keep up with his work.

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