Horror movies have always had a soft spot for their monsters. We root for the underdogs, we cheer for the survivor, and then we feel weirdly conflicted when we also kind of love the guy doing the killing.
That tension is exactly what makes In a Violent Nature such a strange and successful film, and it’s exactly what came up when we had the chance to sit down with Ry Barrett, the man behind the mask, for a full conversation about how Johnny was built from the ground up, what it was like to shoot in the Ontario wilderness, and where things are headed with the sequel.
From Indie Horror to Something Iconic
Ry Barrett has been working in indie horror for a long time, well before Johnny ever crossed anyone’s radar. He got his start making a micro-budget horror film with friends, almost purely for the fun of it, and that first project ended up getting distributed worldwide. From there, horror just kept pulling him back. Part of that, he says, is the community.
There’s a built-in audience and a fan base.
He told us. “Horror has this kind of support system that’s just there.” You go to a convention, you meet filmmakers, you fall into another project. It perpetuates. We’ve seen it ourselves; everyone from podcasters to directors to actors in this space tends to be genuinely warm and welcoming, which is honestly the opposite of what people on the outside might expect.
What we were most curious about, though, was the trajectory from that background to landing a character like Johnny. Meaghan made the case early on that Johnny belongs in the conversation with the greats, and that modern slasher killers don’t always have the staying power that the classics do.
Barrett agreed, but he also acknowledged the specific challenge that comes with playing a character who doesn’t speak. There’s no dialogue to lean on, no voice performance to hide behind. It’s all physical.
You have to focus on a completely separate set of details.
He said. Every choice has to land through posture, movement, and timing.
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Building a Character Through Physicality
The work Barrett put into shaping Johnny’s physicality is genuinely fascinating. Director Chris Nash had a very specific vision for how the camera would follow the character, essentially treating Johnny the way a nature documentary would treat an animal moving through its territory. Barrett leaned into that hard.
He studied animal movement, particularly bears, which lines up with Johnny being described in the script as a kind of territorial golem of the area.
His motivation is very smooth, like an animal walking through the woods, until it becomes attack time.
Barrett said. “And then you become a completely different creature.“
He actually developed a mental checklist that he would run through before every take: shoulders, neck, posture, weight. The technical demands were significant because cinematographer Pierce Derks was following right behind him at all times, and Barrett had to subtly cue him before moving so the framing would stay consistent.
Multiple mask configurations were used during the shoot, some of which would have exposed Barrett’s face if he turned without warning. So he learned to lead with his shoulders, let the head follow, and keep everything readable for the camera without ever breaking character.
I’d be like, alright, make sure I do this, this and this and they would keep it consistent.
On top of the technique, Barrett also had the physical demands of shooting up north, just outside Sault Ste. Marie, in warm weather. The black flies were genuinely brutal.
They blacked out my eyes and black flies are attracted to dark things. They would swarm around my eyes and I started wearing net underneath the mask.
Even with that, they still found a way in. He described walking through the forest, trying to stay in character while flies were swarming his eyes. As Meaghan put it, “That just sounds like a horror movie by itself.“
Johnny’s Humanity and the Car Scene
One of the things we love most about In a Violent Nature is that Johnny isn’t a blank. There’s something underneath the violence. Arthur brought up how the character reminds him of Leatherface in that particular way, where you somehow feel bad for a guy who is absolutely doing terrible things.
That thread comes to a head in the car scene, where Johnny gets his one moment of something that reads as vulnerability, his face partially visible through Steven Kostanski’s makeup work, his expression doing real work without a single word.
Barrett said that was the moment he had been waiting for throughout the shoot.
When I saw that scene, I was like, oh, this is my one spot that I can try to give him a little humanity.
He referenced Frankenstein’s monster as a comparison point, and Leatherface too; those brief windows in classic horror where the monster becomes legible as something more than a killing machine. Nash apparently hadn’t intended for quite that much empathy to come through, but when he saw what Barrett brought, he kept it. The unreliable narration that surrounds Johnny’s backstory makes that car scene hit differently because it’s the one concrete moment of something real, something that anchors the myth in a person.
We also told Barrett, directly and without apology, that we think his portrayal of Johnny is the Canadian answer to Kane Hodder.
He took that well, which is probably an understatement. It turns out Barrett has actually been a fan of Hodder for years, met him a few times at conventions, and most recently ended up on a panel with him in Nashville alongside other legends of physical horror performance, including the original Ghostface, Nick Castle.
Barrett’s retelling of sitting on that panel, basically listening in awe while everyone else traded stories about stunts and shoots, is one of the funniest moments in the whole conversation.
People would ask me a question, and I was like, oh wait, I’m on the panel too.
In a Violent Nature 2: The Shark Phase
The sequel comes up, and Barrett gets appropriately cagey about the details, but there are enough breadcrumbs here to make it exciting.
First: the film picks up directly after the first one. No time jump. Johnny is already at the elevated state he was in by the end of the original, which means the film essentially starts at peak viciousness and builds from there. A summer camp setting this time, leaning into very specific genre references, and Barrett describes Johnny’s relationship to the camp as being a lot like Bruce from Jaws: circling, observing, patient.
And then all of a sudden when he attacks, it is just absolute chaos.
His prep for the sequel included watching shark attack videos on YouTube and revisiting Jaws, including catching a screening of it in IMAX while the production was in pre-production.
Watching that in the theater while we were about to go to shoot the movie, I was just like, oh, this is great.
The shark analogy goes beyond just the hunting behavior; there’s something about the deliberateness, the territory, the sudden switch from stillness to violence that Barrett was working to channel.
In terms of what to expect from the kills: he mentioned there are at least three that hit at the level of the yoga scene from the first film, with more following from there. Steven Kostanski is back on makeup effects, which tells you what you need to know about the practical ambitions of the production.
Barrett also confirmed that Nash and producer Shannon Hanmer have a full plan for a third film, and that each entry in the series is conceived as a different kind of arthouse experiment within the slasher format. The first film is the following series, slow and observational.
The second shifts while keeping some of that DNA. The third sounds like it goes somewhere else entirely. And after that, as Barrett noted with a very straight face, they could go to space. Which, of course, spiraled into a full group riff about Johnny slowly walking into a spaceship from the middle of a forest, which felt like the only appropriate way to end that thread.
The Fun Part: Killers and Survival Strategies
We close out every episode with a couple of game questions, and Barrett delivered. Faced with Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Leatherface, he chose to spare Leatherface (he’s practically family at this point), kill Michael Myers (seems mortal enough), and run from Jason (supernatural zombie, potentially teleports, entire planets have died). Arthur pointed out that Jason is fully a zombie by some point in that series, which Barrett agreed made running the only rational option. “He just keeps coming back.”
For his personal survival skill in a horror movie, Barrett landed on duct tape suits as protection against zombies. His logic is airtight: zombies can’t bite through duct tape, therefore, duct tape armor equals survival.
Has he tested this? No. Does he believe he could construct one under pressure? Yes. His one weakness: a bad knee.
I would buckle my knee or something and fall over and that’d be done.
Meaghan assured him she has a full zombie apocalypse plan. Arthur called her a doomsday prepper. She corrected him firmly.
The whole conversation was a genuine pleasure. Ry Barrett is exactly the kind of person you hope is behind one of your favorite horror characters: passionate about the genre, thoughtful about the craft, and completely comfortable with the idea that Johnny might one day walk through a spaceship and start picking off aliens. We’re here for all of it.