This Year's Most Disturbing Horror Movie Reshot Its Entire First Four Weeks [Exclusive]
The slasher film on everyone's lips this summer is Chris Nash's "In A Violent Nature," a film I called "deliciously disgusting but you can't help but cheer" in my review out of the Overlook Film Festival. Instead of following a group of unsuspecting young adults trying to survive, "In A Violent Nature" follows the killer, showing audiences what goes on between the hacking and slashing.
In a recent interview, I asked Nash why he elected to follow a slasher in the woods as opposed to a slasher in the suburbs or in the confines of a sorority house, and he explained it was a matter of practicality. "Well, for it being my first feature and trying to get something together, there's just the logistical aspect of, if we're out in the woods, woods are everywhere," he explained. He did say that he'd be interested in seeing what this approach would look like in a more "hustle and bustle" setting, but laughed thinking about what a logistical nightmare it would be to pull off. And Nash knows a thing or two about logistical nightmares, considering a huge chunk of "In A Violent Nature" needed to be re-shot. Well, "I didn't have to re-shoot it, I coerced my producers into allowing me to reshoot it," Nash clarified.
Shannon Hanmer, Peter Kuplowsky, and Casey Walker served as producers on the film, and Nash said it was difficult to even approach them about doing re-shoots despite the director considering them some of his best friends. "It was so difficult that first four weeks of principal photography, that we ended up reshooting," he said. "It was a huge ordeal for us."
But why did he have to reshoot after almost a month of filming?
Independent filmmaking is hard, y'all
Problems happen on every film set (yes, even and especially on your favorite movie), but when you're making an independent film without the assistance of a Hollywood studio, there's no money hose to make all of those problems go away. Weather problems were a factor in the reshoots, as well as an unfortunate medical issue with the original actor who played the masked slasher, Johnny, who ended up leaving a little ways into production.
"We had to recast on the fly, but we had to have other people step into the role before we actually could find somebody to recast," Nash explained. "So there's I think probably, grand total ... five or six people playing Johnny during that first block of shooting that we tried to do." But the necessary reshoots weren't relegated to problems popping up beyond anyone's control. "And there were just other issues that ... I naively wrote a dog into the film," Nash joked.
I exclaimed that he was breaking the cardinal sin of filmmaking by including one of the four most difficult things to include in a film — fire, water, kids, and animals — and "In a Violent Nature" already includes scenes around a fire and a scene around a lake. "There was a scene at a lake that was much more needlessly complicated the first time we tried shooting it," he said. "In A Violent Nature" features some pretty intense kill sequences, including one that reportedly made people physically ill. Asking producers to reshoot was a pretty big ask, but Nash told me that the entire team knows now that it was the right call to make.
For my complete, in-depth discussion with Chris Nash, check out today's episode of the /Film Daily podcast:
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