"I definitely was that loser in high school with Fangoria posters taped in their locker," says the writer-director Chris Nash. "Everybody thought I was the weird kid, but I've always loved transgressive culture, in general, and I grew up watching horror films. My love of the genre has always been there."
As a teenager in Northern Ontario, Nash began making movies of his own with his parents' VHS camcorder. Using the knowledge he gleaned from behind-the-scenes DVD features and issues of Fangoria magazine, he became a "backyard special effects artist." After graduating from film school, Nash honed his skills working in prosthetic makeup and special effects, which he says has been "very, very valuable for making the kind of movies I want to make, especially this one."
This one is In a Violent Nature, Nash's feature debut. The film is a subversion of the slasher, told from the perspective of a supernatural serial killer named Johnny. The first-time filmmaker was as inspired by the horror flicks of his youth as he was by slow cinema and the work of auteurs like Gus Van Sant. "I was like, let's see what we can do if we can merge the two in a way that pays respect to both."
In a Violent Nature was a hit out of this year's Sundance Film Festival, but as Nash looks to the future, he has no intention of being pigeonholed to any one genre. "Michael Ritchie is somebody that I would definitely want to emulate. He had an amazing career and he got to make so many different kinds of films, but whether it was a thriller like Prime Cut or a satire like The Candidate, they all carry the same voice," he explains. "I'd hope that the films I do carrying forward have a recognizable voice to them, but are wildly different."
Below, Nash shares with A.frame his five favorite films, which are equally eclectic and may offer a clue at one genre he's particularly interested in tackling — though the filmmaker will only say, "We'll see what happens."
Directed by: Barry Levinson | Written by: Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry
I love The Natural. When I was a kid, my dad taped it off of NBC Sunday Night Movie or something like that, and it was a VHS I would watch over and over and over again. I was just fascinated with that movie. I have an affinity for sports movies in general, but especially baseball movies. There's a mythology and this ingrained sense of Americana in baseball films that I love, and I think that The Natural encapsulates all of it perfectly.
Directed by: Sam Raimi | Written by: Sam Raimi and Scott Spiegel
I watched Army of Darkness before I watched Evil Dead II, but Evil Dead II was definitely the apex of movies that are horror-comedy but that never lean too far into either direction and create something completely whole cloth out of both. It's also just the confidence in the direction and the inventiveness and the fact that Sam Raimi's style is still getting just ripped off by everybody. There are so many movies I watch now, like, "You're just aping Sam Raimi in every aspect!"
Written and Directed by: Wesley Archer
Jac Mac & Rad Boy Go! is a short film that is like a proto Beavis and Butt-Head almost. It's these two kids that are wild, angry punk rocker typers, and the whole thing is they want to get beer and go to a party, and they end up ramming into a transport truck carrying a nuclear weapon and blowing up the world, and they go to hell at the end. It's all pencil animated, and it looks beautiful.
Wes Archer went on to be a director for The Simpsons and King of the Hill — he's very, very accomplished — but I watched that short at a young impressionable age. My local CBS network would play compilations from the old cable show Night Flight on Saturdays, and one of them had Jac Mac & Rad Boy Go! This was at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, so I was this kid staying up all night to watch these crazy things out in the middle of the woods. I loved that one in particular.
Written and Directed by: Conor McPherson
The Eclipse is a new addition to my favorite films. It's a movie that balances different genres perfectly, and it's about older characters at a certain moment in their life, which I feel like we don't see enough of. It's equal parts romance, horror film and satire. It's this beautiful little love story with very effective scares in it, and not enough people have seen it. I love that film.
Written and Directed by: Noah Buschel
Noah Buschel is a filmmaker that I would say has been overlooked. He's directed so many beautiful, mesmerizing films with the most amazing actors in them, but he did one called The Phenom with Johnny Simmons. It is another baseball movie, but it's a baseball movie with very, very little baseball in it. It's more of a character study about a young pitcher on his way to the majors who gets the yips. Johnny Simmons plays the young pitcher, and he is seeing a sports psychologist, played by Paul Giamatti, who is trying to figure out the cause of his sudden anxiety.
Simmons plays this character so stoic. I feel like the hardest thing to do as an actor is to convey that you're thinking something by staring straight at the camera, but you always feel like his mind is racing — even though he's saying so little and he's being so measured in his choices. It's phenomenally directed, and it's right in line with everything else that Noah Buschel has done, but because it is a sports movie and a baseball movie especially, I do carry it in higher esteem.
