Somebody blow the fireman’s whistle. Johnny’s back. Friday night, Fantastic Fest surprised its audience with In a Violent Nature 2, […]
Somebody blow the fireman’s whistle. Johnny’s back.
Friday night, Fantastic Fest surprised its audience with In a Violent Nature 2, and I walked out thinking we’ve got an old-school slasher war brewing. It’s one of the most exciting things happening in horror right now.
Before we get into that, this isn’t a review of In a Violent Nature 2. After nearly 25 years at Bloody Disgusting, I’m mostly happy to leave reviews to the wonderful writers around me, whose voices I trust. Occasionally, though, something gets me excited enough to go off on a tangent.
Johnny did that.
While the version we saw at Fantastic Fest still felt like it needed work, whatever changes between now and release, there are flashes of greatness. More specifically, there are kills that immediately belong in the conversation alongside some of the most outrageous things Art the Clown has ever done.
I should put my own connection up front: I helped drive the release of Terrifier 2 and executive produced Terrifier 3. I’m incredibly proud of those movies. Watching another independent slasher franchise give us something this vicious and inventive makes me excited about the possibilities for both.
Think about the run we’re on. Terrifier 2 broke through in 2022 with the infamous bedroom slaughter. In a Violent Nature arrived through IFC and Shudder in 2024 and had everyone talking about its yoga kill. Later that year, Terrifier 3 delivered its chainsaw massacre in a shower. Now Johnny’s back with a whole new collection of atrocities.
From the audience’s side, it feels like somebody keeps raising the bar.
That doesn’t mean the filmmakers are literally responding to each other’s scenes. But watching these movies arrive, hearing the reactions, and wondering what the next one could possibly do? That’s the fun of it. It’s an old-school rap feud with practical effects.
What makes it especially exciting is that the franchises offer distinctly different flavors of slasher mayhem.
increasingly scratches my itch. It’s colorful, fantastical, funny, and lethal. Art’s world has expanded into supernatural mythology, while his personality has become as much of an attraction as the violence. has leaned further into the humor and absurdity without losing the nastiness.
Freddy could turn somebody’s nightmare into an elaborate murder. Art brings that same imaginative cruelty into bedrooms, bathrooms, and whatever unfortunate space he wanders into next.
Meanwhile,In a Violent Nature scratches the Friday the 13th itch. I’m talking about the physical world of those movies: the woods, the cabins, the counselors, and the hulking bastard coming to tear them apart. Jason was hardly immune to supernatural developments, but his killing usually had a blunt, physical simplicity compared with Freddy’s dream logic.
With Johnny heading to summer camp in the sequel, the resemblance is impossible to miss. Metaphorically speaking, this franchise has fully put on the Jason mask.
There’s nothing wrong with that. If you love watching a masked brute stomp through camp and obliterate counselors, there’s plenty here for you.
A whole generation of horror fans never experienced the steady back-and-forth of new Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street movies arriving throughout the ’80s. Art and Johnny are starting to give us our own version of that anticipation, and we don’t even realize it.
There’s even some appreciation across the franchises already. In a 2024 interview with /Film, David Howard Thornton (Art the Clown) singled out In a Violent Nature’s much-discussed kill, saying:
“I was glad to see other filmmakers pushing the extremes with kills, especially with the creativity behind it, too.”
Exactly.
Major kill spoilers follow for Terrifier 2, Terrifier 3, and the work print of In a Violent Nature 2. If you want Johnny’s new atrocities to surprise you, stop here.
The bedroom sequence in Terrifier 2 was the moment that really blew things open for me. Art doesn’t simply kill Allie. He keeps finding ways to make an already unbearable situation worse, right down to the bleach and salt. At the time, it was among the most shocking things I’d ever seen put on a movie screen.
Then In a Violent Nature gave us that yoga kill, folding a human being into an impossible arrangement of limbs and exposed anatomy. Whether it topped Art wasn’t really the point. Johnny had earned a place at the table.
Terrifier 3 followed with a chainsaw sequence that goes from brutal to excessive to outright absurd. It keeps going long after you think it has made its point. Eventually, you’re laughing because it’s so outrageously cruel, or because you have absolutely no idea how else to react.
In a Violent Nature 2 dives deeper into that particular pleasure.
It opens with Johnny repeatedly smashing what barely resembles a face anymore. We’re practically arriving after the kill, and he’s still at it. He’s playing with his food before the movie has even gotten going.
That attitude carries through the violence. A machete going into somebody isn’t necessarily the end of the encounter. Johnny chops, dismembers, and occasionally turns the remains into something he can throw at another person. There’s an absurdity to it that pushes the carnage into grotesque slapstick.
Then there’s the centerpiece.
A man is restrained in a chair, his abdomen opened up, before chains pull his body apart from opposing sides. As the tension increases, more of his insides are exposed. It’s a prolonged display of suffering that starts wandering into Hellraiser territory.
Johnny reaches inside. You think he’s going for the heart.
Instead, he grabs the spine, twists, and tears out the head with a whole mess of organs still attached. The head lands on the floor, blinking. Johnny steps on the exposed heart.
And somehow, the little gesture afterward is what completes the scene: as he leaves, he casually nudges the head aside with his foot. It’s in his way. He’s got somewhere else to be.
This obviously isn’t for everybody. There’s a particular audience that appreciates this level of elaborate, ridiculous splatter, and I am very much part of it. I love the effects work, the imagination, and that moment when a scene pushes so far past anything remotely plausible that you can only marvel at the audacity.
Now I’m thinking about Terrifier 4.
Leone already has the challenge of following his own bedroom and shower sequences. But audiences will also arrive carrying memories of what Johnny has done. Every new standout kill becomes part of the conversation, another thing people invoke when they ask what could possibly come next.
As we covered in July, Leone has already endorsed the description of Terrifier 4 as the second movie on steroids. That’s a hell of a promise.
People are going to argue about which franchise is better, which killer is scarier, and who delivered the more outrageous death. Have those arguments. Enjoy them. Both franchises have given horror fans new monsters to celebrate and new reasons to buy a ticket.
I want to walk out of a Johnny movie wondering how Art could possibly top that. Then I want Art to do something so fucking ridiculous that I start wondering what Johnny has up his sleeve.
Art the Clown and Johnny keep raising the bar, and we get to sit in a packed theater and lose our fucking minds. Everybody wins.
