Johnny is the villainous main protagonist of In A Violent Nature. He was portrayed by Ry Barrett.
Biography[]
Backstory[]
Johnny was born during the 1940s or 1950s, and had an unspecified mental disability at birth. At some point, his father, a merchant, gave him a special necklace that originally belonged to his mother. Sometime around 1954, Johnny's father set up and ran seveal supply stores within a large piece of land in Ontario, Canada that had been leased out by a logging company. These stores would sell goods to the local lumberjacks, but because the prices were often jacked up, the lumberjacks grew to hate Johnny's father and would take their anger out on his son.
One day, one of the lumberjacks got drunk and broke his ankle after tripping on one of Johnny's toy trucks, leaving him out of work for months. The other lumberjacks blamed Johnny for the accident and decided they would get back at him. They had lured Johnny to the top of an old fire tower by claiming they found a bag of toys up there, where one of the loggers jumped out and scared him while wearing an old firefighter's mask. However, the prank went wrong as Johnny ended up falling to his death from the top of the tower. The loggers, horrified by what they had done, decided to put the mask on Johnny's body in an effort to make it look like he fell while playing in the fire tower by himself. However, Johnny's father soon found out the truth and angrily confronted the men in the mess hall. A fight soon broke out and Johnny's father was killed in the scuffle, with the man who killed him claiming self-defence and the company covering up the incident.
First and Second Killing Sprees[]
About a week after the incident, Johnny came back from the dead and brutally massacred almost all of the workers at the logging company in an act of revenge. However, the last remaining worker managed to defeat Johnny and buried him beneath the remains of the fire tower where he originally died, using his mother's necklace to keep his soul at rest. The executives of the company would come across the left-over carnage soon after, but since the sole survivor did not disclose his encounter with Johnny, the workers's dead bodies were blamed on food poisoning and the torn-apart bodies were blamed on hungry animals in the area. As a result of the massacre, the company closed up shop, but not before a police officer briefly saw Johnny watching him while he was investigating the crime scene.
60 years after the original massacre, Johnny struck again when he rose from his grave and massacred a number of forest rangers who were now working in the area. However, he was once again defeated by a sole survivor who, coincidentally, was the son of the survivor of the original massacre. Remembering the stories his father had told him, he buried Johnny beneath the remains of the fire tower and left his mother's necklace there to keep his soul at rest.
Third Killing Spree[]
Ten years after his second killing spree, a group of teen friends discover Johnny's necklace hanging on the remains of the fire tower. One of them, Troy, pockets it, and moments after the friends leave, Johnny once again rises from the ground. Enraged, he begins his search for the necklace and walks through the woods. He pauses at the sight of a rotting fox corpse and hears a nearby argument between a ranger and a hunter named Chuck, the latter of whom set the traps that killed the fox. After the ranger leaves, Johnny walks into Chuck's house, where he sees a necklace that he mistakes for his, triggering a brief memory of his father. Chuck soon returns, but is horrified by Johnny and runs away. In the woods, he gets his leg stuck in his own bear trap and is killed by Johnny. Later, Johnny hears a car in the distance and pursues it.
Johnny approaches the group of friends sitting around a campfire, drawn to their location by the sound of gunfire made by the group discharging their own gun into the woods. He silently watches as one of the friends, Ehren, regals the others by telling them the supposed urban legend of Johnny's death and the following massacre, which he heard from his uncle who once lived in the area. After the story, the group takes a selfie, unknowingly photographing Johnny in the distant background. Later that night, in their cabin, Johnny watches Troy and Kris argue over their treatment of one another in front of the group earlier in the evening, with Troy expressing his dislike of Colt. Soon after, Ehren steps out of his cabin by himself, and Johnny decapitates him at the mouth with a drawknife before dragging his body to a nearby park ranger office, using the body to break in and vandalize display cases and obtain their contents: dragging hooks, a hewing axe, and an antique firefighter mask.
The next day, Johnny comes across Aurora and Brodie on a lake dock, as Brodie is expressing her romantic interest in Aurora. Brodie wants to swim, but Aurora leaves to practice yoga. As Brodie swims in the lake alone, Johnny pulls her underneath the surface and drowns her. He then pursues Aurora, who is standing near a cliffside practicing yoga. Johnny kills her with his dragging hooks, before throwing her mutilated body off the cliff.
Later, Troy, Colt, Kris, and Evan argue regarding whether their friends are actually missing or just absent of their own accord, with Troy doubting any suspicious circumstances including the presence of Johnny in the previous night's photo. As the argument escalates, Troy throws the group's car keys into the woods. Johnny sets down his axe to pick up the keys, playing with an attached toy car keychain in a childlike manner, removing his mask and revealing his disfigured face. Colt discovers Johnny's axe, and Colt and Kris drive off to the ranger station on an ATV. Johnny is triggered by overhearing Troy's disparaging mention of Colt's dead father, and kills Troy and Evan after being shot by Evan. Colt and Kris return shortly afterward, having found Ehren's body at the park ranger station, but flee at the sight of Johnny. By nightfall, Johnny approaches the station, where the ranger, who was the sole survivor of Johnny's second massacre, is explaining to Colt and Kris that the locket—now being worn by Kris—is what keeps Johnny's soul at rest. The ranger momentarily subdues Johnny by shooting him, but Johnny paralyzes the ranger as Colt and Kris flee. Johnny kills the ranger by dismembering him with a log splitter.
Johnny pursues Colt and Kris and overhears their plan to lure him to the fire tower and kill him. Colt attempts to distract Johnny to trap him, but Johnny brutally kills him with an axe. A shellshocked Kris leaves Johnny's locket hanging on a gas canister and flees into the woods. Johnny is never seen past this point, but right at the end of the movie, the left-behind gas canister is shown missing Johnny's locket, possibly implying that Johnny is now at rest again.