Slasher films usually droop between grisly highlights as a result of weak plotting and cardboard characters meant to lend structural integrity to their shock content material. “In a Violent Thoughts” avoids these pitfalls by just about sidestepping completely the usual niceties of narrative and psychological element. There may be explanatory backstory — nevertheless piecemeal and possibly-inaccurate — however in any other case writer-director Chris Nash’s first characteristic approaches the same old bloody enterprise with a form of minimalist purity, enabled by focusing virtually wholly on the POV of 1 Unstoppable Killing Machine. 

It’s a gambit that may simply flip monotonous. But this Canadian indie manages to maintain us engaged, stirring queasy viewer dread if not a lot outright terror. Premiering in Sundance’s Midnight part, the Shudder Unique is slated to start streaming on that style platform someday this spring. 

We appear to be again in “Blair Witch” territory at the start (and once more throughout a panicked stretch on the finish), as off-camera hikers poke across the ruins of a forest hearth tower. Certainly one of them spies a necklace draped on a pipe, which he pockets earlier than they go away. Our suspicion that eradicating this talisman may be a nasty concept quickly bears fruit, as instantly afterward the bottom stirs, and a person’s determine coated with soil emerges from its grave. It lumbers to a decrepit home on the border of those parklands — by which the entity as soon as lived, we glean — the place a neighborhood poacher has the misfortune to be malingering. 

This primary kill isn’t graphic, however such restraint gained’t final lengthy. That night, the ghoul is drawn to a campfire exterior a cabin, introducing us to seven younger adults staying there. Certainly one of them (Sam Roulston as Ehren) tells the native legend of the “White Pine Bloodbath,” which concerned lumberjacks a number of years prior selecting on the “mentally hindered” son of a retailer proprietor. Their pranks inadvertently led to the boy’s dying — falling from that aforementioned hearth tower — adopted by the boys’s personal mysterious slaughter. (Later, within the current time, a sport warden performed by Reece Presley fleshes out this historical past a bit additional.) 

Evidently, our mute, relentless perp (Ry Barrett) is that wronged Johnny come again to vengeful half-life, wreaking grievous bodily hurt on anybody he finds. Breaking right into a ranger station, he acquires rusty instruments of historical-turned-homicidal worth from show circumstances. Subsequent mayhem is vivid, to say the least. Whereas not all of the gory prosthetic FX completely persuade, Nash’s penchant for lengthy sustained photographs embody some coups of seamless transition between visibly intact actor and ugly aftermath. 

Naturally, there’s a Ultimate Lady (Andrea Pavlovic as Kris). However as we’re virtually completely locked into the undead killer’s perspective — primarily from a touring digital camera place behind him as he creeps by the woods — these steadily petulant, argumentative victims by no means require a lot dimensionality. Their eventual realization that one thing may be very improper occurs largely off-screen, with dialogue overheard simply briefly in moments earlier than they face deadly peril.

Except for the aforementioned stretches of spoken backstory, the one extended verbal interlude comes from Lauren Taylor in a late look as a passing Good Samaritan. Her monologue pushes the envelope when it comes to risking dissipation of the creepy atmospherics. Nonetheless, finally the temper of menace is sustained sufficient for an unsettled, eerie fadeout.

Utilizing an virtually sq. facet ratio, DP Pierce Derks makes the northern Ontario wilderness places each pretty and sinister, with sufficient selection to the visible ways that the movie by no means will get caught in discovered footage horror’s first-person-camera stylistic rut. A whole lack of any unique scoring (some incidental music is heard from radios and such) largely accentuates the stress. 

“Violent Nature” isn’t precisely the scariest of display screen horrors; it doesn’t have a lot in the way in which of humor or complexity. But its stripped-down strategy to a well-known gist has a distinctiveness that’s spectacular, and is bound to please followers who’re at all times up for a brand new slasher movie — however want most of them weren’t so interchangeable.