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Rev Horror

The Ruins

Dir. Carter Smith (2008)

A group of tourists are stranded within some Mayan ruins with plants that are alive.


There really aren't a whole lot of book-to-movie adaptations in the horror genre that are particularly good. If you take Stephen King out of it, that number decreases drastically, so when you come across one, you have to treasure it like gold. I came across writer Scott Smith's novel The Ruins a couple of years after it was released and fucking loved it, and when I found out it had a film adaptation, I couldn't wait to check it out. The psychological horror of the book was gonna be a tough nut to crack for any filmmaker that dared to try, but by God did director Carter Smith hit the nail on the head.


Friends Eric (Shawn Ashmore), Amy (Jena Malone), Jeff (Jonathan Tucker), and Stacy (Laura Ramsay) are looking for an adventure on the last day of their Mexican vacation, and when German tourist Mathias (Joe Anderson) offers to take them to a secret archaeological dig in the middle of the jungle, they jump at the chance to see something nobody else gets to see. Once they set foot within the circle surrounding the structure, they are boxed in by a group of locals carrying guns and threatening to shoot them if they step outside. The tourists have stumbled across an ancient area where the plants kill anything that comes inside, and they now have to try to survive, and leave, a place more dangerous than they could have possibly imagined.

There are some truly horrifying moments in The Ruins that are handled to near perfection. The psychological warfare of the plants, made startlingly clear when they realize that the ringtone they have been hearing is a trap laid by the plants in order to lure them into an attack zone, is terrifying, as is the speed at which these creatures (are plants creatures?) move as they attempt to burrow inside their newfound hosts. The film is also much more violent than I expected to see, with lots of blood and visceral gore as the characters lose more and more of themselves.

The characters created by Ashmore, Malone, Tucker, and Ramsay are outstanding, with each of their idiosyncracies working together to create individual narratives as part of the whole. Tucker's character, the future doctor, is a dangerous know-it-all, while his girlfriend, played by Malone, is the party girl who is desperately trying to escape from their predetermined future, for instance. Anderson's character is a little less nuanced, but he does a great job in his role as well. They're faithful retellings of the characters from the book (to the best of my recollection), which makes sense because Scott Smith wrote the screenplay for the film as well.

While films almost never match up well to the books that spawned them, and while The Ruins is no exception, this is due in large part to the book just being fucking amazing. The film version is excellent, hugely underrated, and deserving of much more attention than it has received since release. Most of the credit is due to the writing of Scott Smith, who has created a concept here that is utterly terrifying and totally believable, even as farfetched as it may seem on the surface. The way that Carter Smith is able to personify the plants, giving a characterization to what his writer had already laid out in the heads of anyone who read the book, is phenomenal, and it totally makes the movie. I can honestly say I've never once in my life been afraid of plants, but The Ruins starts to make me wonder.


Who this movie is for: Tourist horror fans, Psychological horror lovers, Botanists


Bottom line: The Ruins is a fantastic film, and it's a great adaptation of an even better book. The actors are all fantastic, it's surprisingly brutal, and it's legitimately scary throughout. I don't know how in the world this one is so underseen, but if you're one of the people who missed it, you need to check it out. Granted, it's definitely much more of a summer movie than it is for October, but fuck it, watch it anyway. It's a good one.



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