Reception to northern Ontario filmmaker's slasher movie surpasses his expectations

The reception to Chris Nash's first feature film, In a Violent Nature, has exceeded all of his expectations.

The low-budget slasher movie, filmed near Nash's hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, got a theatrical release and opened at the eighth spot on the American box office.

"Having people talk about it, having fan art being created, it's just really, it's a hard thing to grasp," said Nash, who wrote and directed the film.

The movie also got a shout-out from the 'king of horror', Stephen King.

"If you need a slasher movie, this one will do the job," King said on X, formerly Twitter.

"It's leisurely, almost languorous, but when the blood flows, it flows in buckets. The killer in his mask looks like the world's most terrifying minion."

Nash says he came up with the idea for the movie when he was a student at York University.

He had just seen the Gus Van Sant film Gerry, in which Casey Affleck and Matt Damon play two young men who get lost in the desert without water or supplies.

"The whole film is very, very methodical and deliberate in this pacing. And we kind of just follow those two characters throughout the entire movie, just walking through the desert," Nash said.

"And I thought it was mesmerizing."

Nash wondered if he could do the same thing with a slasher film. What if the movie followed the killer the whole time, instead of focusing on his victims?

The movie follows a mute killer, resurrected from his grave, as he dispatches young people in the northern Ontario wilderness.

Nash says the film's crew started filming in the Kawartha Lakes region, near Toronto, but he later decided to switch to the Algoma region instead.

"I'd always set it in the Algoma region," he said.

"It was where I grew up. It's where I kind of imagined all my films take place."

The movie has made $3.6 million at the domestic box office, and will be available on the streaming service Shudder dedicated to horror movies and thrillers later this year.