Meditations with a Slasher: Rethinking Pizza through In a Violent Nature
Taking a new approach to familiar favorites can yield surprising results
In a Violent Nature (2024, dir. Chris Nash) takes the slasher formula and flips it around, telling a familiar story from an unfamiliar perspective. Basically, it’s an early Friday the 13th sequel from the POV of Jason Voorhees.
It’s not unusual, in a slasher, to get a few shots from the perspective of the killer – glancing through windows, advancing on an unsuspecting victim, that kind of thing. But there’s a big difference between a few shots and an entire movie.
All sorts of interesting effects cascade from this inversion. And none of them, to my mind, were clearly foreseeable results of that decision.
Which got me thinking. What would happen if I took a familiar food and treated it in a similar way? What would result, in terms of the experience?
The results of the movie’s approach are divisive. Some (like me) love the movie, others find it tests their patience. Such is the risk of taking the slasher’s perspective, because, if you think about it, what is a slasher doing most of the time?
Watching. Lurking. Or, as is often the case with Johnny, the slasher of In a Violent Nature, walking.
This being a classic, cabin-in-the-woods variety slasher, Johnny’s walking is usually through the woods. Old growth forests with high canopies, fern groves, stands of pine. He walks and walks, until he reaches his destination, and, with it, his victims. The experience is that of monotony punctuated by extreme violence.
I’m not alone, it seems, in finding the monotony oddly soothing.
This is largely due to the movie’s sound design, which even its critics admit is impressive. Everything is diegetic: the birdsong, the bug chatter, the snapping of branches underfoot. There’s no score, almost as if the movie’s arguing that music more rightly belongs to the young adults whom Johnny is stalking, the ones sorting out their relationship dynamics while trying to survive. Johnny’s score is nature itself.
Maybe that’s why it’s so soothing, zen-like, watching him walk. Because Johnny and his actions are aligned with the natural world. In fact, there are bookend nods toward this in the movie, with Johnny being compared by two different characters to a wild animal: first by the doomed ranger and later by the driver who picks up our final girl.
The sound design also compensates for the relative lack of plot. The typical slasher plot, centered on the victims, isn’t completely absent here, but it’s backgrounded, filtered through Johnny’s limited perspective – and through his environment. And this environment is remarkably pretty, both inherently and because of how it’s shot. Like a Terrence Malick movie.
The result is that In a Violent Nature is relaxing in the same way that watching a nature documentary can be relaxing, even when the predators need to hunt. They’re just doing what they do. Deliberately.
This is a surprising place to end up – thinking about the comfort provided by nature’s indifference – when you started off watching an ostensible slasher movie. This is what I mean when I say that the results of the film’s inversion weren’t predictable.
If I was going to find out what a similar inversion might accomplish in terms of food, I first had to identify something just as familiar as the backwoods slasher formula.
I settled on pizza, because it’s suitably familiar, and also oddly appropriate. I’d bet that more pizza has been consumed while watching slasher movies than any other food.
Next was the matter of figuring out what it would even mean to “invert” a pizza in the sense I’m talking about.
It seems to me that pizza is usually characterized by its approach to the crust: deep dish, New York-style, Neapolitan, etc. At several national pizza chains, you go to place your order, first you have to decide what kind of crust you want.
Flipping this around means backgrounding the crust and focusing on the rest of the pizza. And what’s that? Sauce, cheese, other toppings. My inverted pizza could start there.
I decided to pick a topping, the first one most people think of, just as Jason is likely to be the first slasher people think of, just as a cabin in the woods is probably the first place people think of as a slasher’s proper setting. Pepperoni.
Usually pepperoni is pork or beef, sometimes both. Most often it’s pork or includes pork, so I settled on pork for my inverted pizza. And, given our friend Johnny’s… deliberate pace, let’s call it, I thought I’d cook the pork slow, braising it with the flavors and ingredients of pepperoni, pizza sauce, and other common toppings.
I braised pork shoulder in pureed tomato, with onion and garlic, sugar, red wine, and a splash of white vinegar, along with spices commonly found in pepperoni (cayenne, paprika, fennel seed) and pizza sauce (dried oregano, red pepper flake).
Normally, the toppings on a pizza complement the crust. But I wanted the crust to complement my “toppings.” I was thinking of using the crust like a side of fresh bread, for dipping.
As I thought about the movie, though, it occurred to me that it involves more than one type of inversion. First there’s the foregrounding of Johnny discussed above. But at the end there’s something else.
As Johnny hacks at his last victim, we leave him and begin to follow our final girl, Kris. We follow her as she escapes, makes her way to a road, and flags down a truck. This, the moment of rescue, is where we’d typically leave our final girl, but we stay with her. Again, this is a divisive choice. Because staying with her undercuts any sense of triumph the typical slasher ending might give us, and instead attunes us to her paranoia, and the sense that her ordeal will never be over. Another interesting effect achieved by inversion, one that builds on the previous instance.
What this meant for my inverted pizza was trying to think of some way to take what I’d already done and give it a final twist, one that played on some other food that was just as familiar as pizza.
Tacos. It was perfect, because I was already thinking of how I might incorporate the pizza’s “crust” into the preparation. I’d use the crust like a tortilla, and my braised pork would be the filling, topped with mozzarella.
That got me most of the way there, but I felt like I was still missing something. Some final point of connection to the movie to bring everything together. Something less cerebral and more basic and experiential.
I had this aromatic braise, a bright, uniform red, but the movie’s prevailing color is green. The forest floor, the tree-lined panoramas.
This wasn’t critical enough to make me rethink my braise in such a way to change its color, but I did want to bring some green to the plate. I could make a green sauce that complemented the filling’s pizza flavors: something with basil and arugula. A pesto.
I had a plan. Now what would result, in terms of experience?
I mean, it’s delicious, for one thing. And it does hit all those notes a pizza hits, albeit in a totally different way. The crust-as-tortilla thing works, and it’s reminiscent of tucking into carne asada with flour tortillas.
That said, it’s as much its own thing as, say, a stromboli or calzone might be. In my opinion, the ratio here of filling to crust/bread is better.
Watching In a Violent Nature, I wondered if someone who had never seen a slasher could still appreciate and enjoy it. It’s impossible for me to know. But, as someone who’s seen his share, I know I appreciated the story I wasn’t seeing in addition to the one I was.
In the same way, I think a lot of the satisfaction of this dish is how it plays on pizza and, to a lesser extent, tacos. That said, I think someone unfamiliar with those foods would still enjoy this.
Good luck, though, finding such a person. The search might test your patience.
Recipe and demo video below.
I think I'm most interested in what meals become analogous to the sub genre or film's style. Slasher as a basic pizza is brilliant to me. There's also something engaging and inspiring about seeing how far the elements of a dish can be reconfigured and rearranged while still keeping their core flavors and essence.