Horror is a genre that thrives upon disruption and going against the grain. That being said, there’s a curious quality where fringe fascinations can progressively become mainstream, and what was once subversive is now the new normal. There was a time when a slasher film like Halloween was anarchic and groundbreaking, only for it to […]
‘Good Boy’
There’s a common superstition that animals are especially susceptible to supernatural influence. Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy becomes a fascinating deconstruction of this theory, rather than coming across as a random and unjustified stylistic experiment. The story that Good Boy tells isn’t exactly remarkable – a man is plagued by supernatural forces after he and his dog move into a new home – but what makes it stand out is the way in which it’s told. By presenting this horror story from a dog’s perspective, Leonberg creates a uniquely disorienting encounter that’s filtered through a creature that perpetually senses peril, yet struggles to make sense of what’s happening. One of Good Boy’s most inspired stylistic choices involves the decision to obscure the face of Indy’s owner so that incident feels even more detached from reality and the standard horror experience.
A human who is caught in a horror film at least has the resources to understand the nature of ghosts and supernatural scenarios. A dog does not have these same frames of reference and media comprehension skills. A dog instead experiences everything through heightened senses, which turn a stressful situation into something that’s almost unbearable for Good Boy’s Indy. There are plenty of horror films that explore the dissolution of an unbreakable bond as loved ones are torn apart. Good Boy endlessly heightens this concept through the conduit of a dog who operates as this eternally loyal companion who does whatever he can to protect his partner. In many ways, Good Boy is a greater risk than Presence and In A Violent Nature. The latter two films are still subversive horror movies, albeit stories that can still rely upon the familiarity of human characters and creative cinematography. Good Boy lives and dies on how well its lead animal sells this story. Indy rises to the occasion, which is surely why he’s the dog who headlines the movie. Good Boy’s risk seems to pay off, although there will still be audiences who are inevitably left unmoved by this “final canine’s” performance.
‘Good Boy’
Steven Soderbergh is a filmmaker who has been directing for four decades and is a name that is practically synonymous with subversion, due to his sophomore film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, which redefined the medium itself. He’s one of cinema’s most exciting innovators and someone who has bucked up against convention through movies like Solaris, Full Frontal, The Girlfriend Experience, and more recent offerings like Unsane and Kimi. Presence, at the surface level, doesn’t seem to be anything extraordinary. Much like Good Boy, the film looks at perturbing paranormal activity that begins when the Payne family moves into their new suburban home. However, Soderbergh is a filmmaker who has disrupted the medium and industry throughout his entire career, so a movie like Presence is incredibly fitting as a late-game project for the unconventional storyteller.
Presence depicts the Payne family’s plight as they begin to believe that their home is haunted. Presence presents a fairly run-of-the-mill ghost story, but where it excels is that it’s told through the spectre’s perspective. The film’s floaty and dream-like camerawork – which Soderbergh is also responsible for – doubles as the poltergeist’s POV. Presence never feels indulgent in this regard, and it uses its subversive idea to deliver some particularly inspired cinematography. Presence doesn’t feel like the average haunted house story because it’s made up of long, lingering sequences that fade in and out of existence, like a ghost. Presence is more of a visual spectacle than Good Boy and In A Violent Nature, even though they all create unique shots through their original approaches to storytelling.
‘Presence’
Haunted house stories often rely on jump scares, yet Presence creates horror and tension by the growing unease that each sequence generates until the film’s suffocating finale. Presence is an intricate tightrope walk in tone, pacing, and tension, but it pulls it off and rejuvenates the horror subgenre in the process. Presence filters its story through not just a ghost, but a lost spirit who shares a connection to the family that lives in the house that it’s haunting. The film is just as much an emotional family drama as it is a poltergeist picture. Much like with In A Violent Nature and Good Boy, Presence finds the perfect story for its revolutionary point of view so that the cinematography and visual storytelling match — and strengthen — the movie’s themes.
While Good Boy and Presence use perspective to redefine haunted house stories, In A Violent Nature uses this idea to deconstruct slasher cinema. Horror offers endless versatility when it comes to its slasher icons, but masked murderers like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers have certainly become iconic subgenre archetypes. Horror directors have been making slasher films for over 50 years, and director Chris Nash’s In A Violent Nature wisely pulls from the genre’s biggest cultural touchstones in order to establish a framework and foundation that’s second nature to the audience before it subverts and destroys.
‘In a Violent Nature’
In A Violent Nature seems as if it will play out like any nature-based slasher movie, only for it to be told entirely from the killer’s perspective, who just so happens to be a resurrected undead slaughter savant. In A Violent Nature gets a lot of mileage out of some of its more obvious subversions, such as shifting the slasher narrative from the prey’s perspective to that of the cold, calculating killer. However, in the case of In A Violent Nature, the killer is an inscrutable, stoic monster who communicates with murder. This allows the movie to play with existing horror constructs, like tension, but through completely original ways.
The experience has less to do with which sympathetic characters will survive and how they will outsmart the killer, but rather how to make the audience become complicit in this deranged spirit’s deadly ways. There’s a level of unprecedented intimacy with the film’s killer – Johnny (Ry Barrett) – that’s previously been explored in other subversive horror deconstructions, such as Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. In A Violent Nature the audience with the killer, but in this case, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they understand this force of nature any better. It’s a detached, callous experience that evokes the rawness of the early 2000s’ aforementioned “torture porn” fascination where uncomfortable stories would become even more disturbing.
The way in which In A Violent Nature depicts its vicious kills with a detached impartiality is reminiscent of the unbiased eye of a nature documentary. Nature documentaries play with the audience’s perceptions of safety and danger, predator and prey, which was explicitly part of Nash’s agenda with this experiment. In A Violent Nature makes the audience become a fly on the wall of this deranged experience, yet in a manner that’s unique from how Good Boy or Presence taps into comparable feelings. It’s interesting to see how the “nature documentary” style that’s been cited by Nash has evolved to the point where this concept has become explicit. For instance, Blumhouse’s Nightmares of Nature documentary series turns the natural world into a “serial killer’s” playground. Nightmares of Nature uses perspective to blur these lines. It’s a fascinating companion piece to Nash’s blood-soaked slasher.
‘In a Violent Nature’
This trio of films teases a future for the haunted house and slasher subgenres where their survival depends upon their ability to make tired ideas feel reinvigorated and original again. However, this becomes a problem because the innovation seen in these movies is finite. You can’t have a dozen horror movies from a dog’s perspective. These ideas work because they’re creative, unique, and justify their stylized nature, but endlessly replicating this formula dooms it to become as hollow and pointless as anything else. This is all to say, what’s going on in these movies can’t be copied 1:1, but it can still function as a framework that seeks to disrupt these tried and true horror staples through perspectives that are genuinely fresh, yet still relatable.
It’s worth pointing out that the latest installment in the Predator franchise, Predator: Badlands, is also embracing this subversive experimentation to some degree. For the first time, a Predator film will be told through the perspective of a Predator — Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) — who operates as the film’s protagonist, rather than a threat. An entire Predator movie that’s told through the Yautjan perspective, without subtitles, would be the truest expression of this recent POV trend. Predator: Badlands seems like it’s slightly restraining itself in this regard through the addition of a Weyland-Yutani synth android (Elle Fanning) who works alongside Dek. Nevertheless, Predator: Badlands continues to reinforce this exciting change of pace in horror, let alone in a mainstream IP.
(L-R) Thia (Elle Fanning) and Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) in 20th Century Studios’ PREDATOR: BADLANDS film. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2025 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Curiously, there have also been a handful of films that explore the collective impact of a single object as it moves between different individuals. 2010’s Changing Hands demonstrates this with a gun and the different people who possess it, but the idea has also been explored through a car in 1964’s The Yellow Rolls-Royce and a counterfeit franc in Robert Bresson’s L’Argent. These aren’t horror movies by any stretch, but it’s possible that the experimentation that’s begun in In A Violent Nature, Presence, and Good Boy could carry over to slasher films that are told through the “perspective” of a weapon, like a machete.
Another potentially unexpected side effect of this trend is that the success and creativity of these high-concept horror films make it harder for something more conventional, like a standard Poltergeist, Amityville Horror, or even Paranormal Activity haunted house story, to succeed. These types of projects, while all innovative in their own ways, may now seem even more generic in comparison to these cutting-edge takes on the subgenre. Alternatively, this rejuvenating trend could see the snake eating its own tail and attempt to revive Poltergeist or Amityville through unique POV-based projects that are set from the spirit’s perspective. It’s no different than when the found-footage subgenre was consuming every horror franchise and nearly made its way into Friday the 13th. What films like Presence, Good Boy, and In A Violent Nature are doing with POV isn’t quite “the new found-footage,” at least not yet, but it has the power to make an equally profound impact if it’s properly utilized.
