Day 10 of our ongoing October horror movie series here at Speculative Chic — and now for more sunny horror for The Kasturi/Files! Chitchat, film discussion, book recs, and cocktail ideas from Gemma Files and Sandra Kasturi!
Sandra: Today we’re talking about The Ruins, based on Scott Smith’s book of the same name. Smith of course shot to fame with A Simple Plan, and its accompanying wonderful, noirish film. The Ruins feels like Midsommar’s evil sister, its ferocious tropical sunshine the twin to Midsommar’s unending midnight sun. SPOILERS ahoy!
Gemma: The title of Ramsey Campbell’s classic collection aside, it’s hard to evoke demons by daylight, especially on film — but it can be done, most often by setting horror in the desert (Elle Callahan’s recent film Head Count comes to mind, available on Netflix, with its vengeful, shapeshifting “hisji”) or some sort of other rural area (Vincenzo Natali’s adaptation of Stephen King and Joe Hill’s In The Tall Grass, also on Netflix). The Ruins, meanwhile — Carter Smith’s adaptation of the novel, with a screenplay by Scott Smith himself — moves skillfully back and forth between stark, bright sun and deep darkness, often juxtaposing both at once to incredible effect. At the time, the book was so existentially depressing and successful that I think we mostly dismissed the movie out of hand, as a standard Hollywood bowdlerization. That perspective is long overdue for a re-haul.
Both novel and movie begin with two American couples on vacation in Mexico — best friends Stacy (Laura Ramsey) and Amy (Jena Malone), along with their boyfriends, Eric (Shawn Ashmore) and Jeff (Jonathan Tucker). By coincidence, they meet German tourist Mathias (Joe Anderson), who tells them his brother went off with a young archaeologist to investigate a Mayan temple no one has ever explored before, because it’s not even listed on local maps. Amy, conflicted over Jeff’s impending departure for medical school, gets drunk as hell the night before and tries to kiss Mathias, something Stacy and Eric have seen happen before. Guilt-stricken, she agrees to accompany the group the next day, even though she’s still hungover; Mathias’s Greek friend Dimitri also tags along.
Sandra: I should just point out here that the book differs from the film in several ways; including the fact that it’s both Amy and Jeff who are going to medical school, and it’s Stacy who gets drunk and makes out (but with one of the Greeks). And it’s Stacy, whose outlook is bleak, and who ends up the Final Girl. Strangely I don’t really have any issue with the changes from book to film; they are thematically the same, and follow the same general plot. Both work equally well in different ways. I would recommend, though, that you not watch and read them too closely back to back — the personality swap in the characters and the little changes will become disorienting. Anyway, carry on!
Gemma: The hike to the temple proves uneventful aside from glimpses of Mayan children watching them through the jungle, but when they get there, both Mathias’s brother and his archaeologist girlfriend seem absent. The temple is palpably ancient, crumbling, covered all over with lush green vines and red flowers, their long pistils lolling out like tongues. Suddenly, villagers appear, desperately shouting at them in Mayan (a warning, we later realize). When Amy steps back onto a patch of vine in order to take a photo, however, the tone changes — weapons come out, and Dimitri also steps onto the vine, trying to take Amy’s camera away in order to appease the men now threatening them. Instead, the village leader shoots Dimitri through the head, causing the group to scramble up the side of the pyramid and “take refuge” at the top, where they find empty tents, Mathias’s brother’s belongings, and an empty shaft down into the interior, full of slightly shifting foliage . . . and darkness.
Don’t step off the path, right?
Sandra: Yeah, don’t step off the path. And maybe, you know, let someone know where the fuck you’re going if you’re heading into the back of beyond in a foreign country. But of course, that’s the perennial optimism we are all guilty of: none of this shit could possibly happen to us.
I’m fascinated by the cultural differences in this film, or rather, the disconnect between people who are the same species. The white kids have a smattering of high school Spanish but can’t really communicate properly in anything but English, and the Mayan villagers who guard the temple don’t seem to speak Spanish either, and they certainly don’t speak English, but presumably a modern Mayan dialect. In a hugely dangerous situation (though of course the Americans and Dimitri don’t know it at first), with no languages in common, and an inability to interpret tone and gestures correctly, the result is disastrous. I love the innate racial prejudice shown in that first confrontation at the temple — the tourists assume these are ignorant villagers — I mean, they ride on horses and have bows and arrows, right? — so they must be “primitive.” And Dimitri responds to the potential threat by thinking he gets it — oh, right, these people think taking pictures is stealing their souls! (You can almost see the thought process on his face.) Which is why he offers up Amy’s camera to placate the poor “ignorant natives” and gets himself killed in the process. And it makes the viewer complicit in that death, because didn’t we also kind of assume that these villagers were a superstitious lot? And maybe they’re overreacting to a level of trespass that isn’t really too bad, right? But of course the villagers are saying “get the fuck away from there” in an effort to protect these idiot twenty-somethings from themselves. But they’re not so compassionate that they’ll put themselves at risk. The speed with which the Mayans deal with any potentially infected people is staggering. You even touched a vine? You’re dead. Game over, man. Game over. It shows us they have systems in place for these kinds of eventualities, which in turn suggests that they’ve been dealing with this shit a long time, the idea of which is fascinating and horrible — just how did these flowering vines get there? And what the fuck are they, really? Did they evolve? How the hell are they going to get out of there or get help?
Gemma: The group can’t call for help because Eric has the only phone and no signal, a cellphone ring that Mathias recognizes as his brother’s — ”We have the same ringtone!” — comes filtering up from inside the temple, tempting him to rappel down into it using a dusty rope and crank someone (the villagers? an earlier party of archaeologists?) has helpfully left behind — but the rope snaps halfway down and Mathias falls, very obviously breaking his back on the temple’s stone floor. Stacy then goes down in turn and falls a far shorter distance, hurting her knee on broken glass from the lantern she took down with her. Jeff wants to make a backboard for Mathias and bring him back up, but Amy runs back down the pyramid, sure she can reason with the villagers. When a boy throws a rock at her she throws a clump of vines back at him, hitting him, and is horrified when the village leader immediately shoots the boy as well. At once, she and Jeff realize the vines are what the villagers fear; since the whole group has already touched them, they cannot be allowed to leave the ruins, for fear of some sort of curse or contagion.
So, Stacy and Amy bring Mathias up, a long, tedious, literally painful process. And the next morning, Stacy finds a tendril of vine has crept into the wound in her leg, appearing to drink her blood while she slept. This “crazy” idea is only confirmed when they discover that vines have also wrapped themselves around Mathias’s paralyzed lower legs, eating them down to the bone.
Carter Smith builds tension less by slow increments than by leaps and bounds, cutting off every fresh hope of escape: the cellphone Amy and Stacy go down again looking for is found clutched in the desiccated hand of Mathias’s brother’s girlfriend, completely drained, at which point the flowers around them start vibrating, imitating the cellphone’s ring as if taunting them. Turns out later on, they can also imitate voices in order to mock, tease or suggest, driving Stacy increasingly frantic, especially once Eric notices more vines growing inside her back and Jeff has to do impromptu surgery, removing a three-foot green length from dangerously close to her spine. But his skills can’t save Mathias, who lives through his legs being crudely amputated only to die while everyone else argues about whose fault their situation is, suffocated as vines cram themselves down his throat.
Sandra: For me, that’s the creepiest moment in the film — when they find out where the cell phone “signal” is coming from. The ringing phone has been a kind of beacon of desperate hope — a working cell phone! they might be saved! — and instead it ends up being the flowers mimicking the sound in order to lure and trap them. Ugh! And it just gets worse. The vines toy with them, take their time. That suggests a semi-sentience at work that is truly frightening — and can’t be reasoned with.
Jeff says (in true privileged fashion): “Four Americans on a vacation don’t just disappear.” He cannot wrap his head around the idea that maybe things won’t always work out for him. The look on his face as he realizes that all his scientific rationale and rationality will not save him! And then the next moment, when he walks it back in his head, refuses to give in to this idea. Having lived that life of privilege, he is, on some level, incapable of coping (except with practical things like to ration water and treat wounds) when things go badly wrong. Amy, the complainer, the negative Nelly constantly seeing the dark side of things, the disaster artist who’s never able to see the upside, is of course perfectly positioned to be the Final Girl — only someone with a profoundly pessimistic point of view could make it through something so terrible alive. As the others disintegrate, Amy’s chin sets harder and harder with determination, even as Jeff’s eyes become luminous with crazy. The last straw is when the vines pull Mathias’s amputated legs away to devour them? assimilate them? And you can see Jeff’s rational mind take a vacation, as his eyes stare wider and wider.
But Jeff gets himself back and finds his center. Again, Tucker conveys this almost entirely through reaction and expression in his eyes. He finds his will and courage and distracts the villagers guarding the temple so Amy can play dead and then have a chance to get away. But the big question really is this: should Amy survive? I think the answer is no. She is carrying spores and god knows what else, and is probably infected in other ways she’s not aware of. After all this time of being the mopey underdog, her survival instinct kicks in at the worst possible moment (for the human race, that is).
Gemma: Given my interest in Mayan/Mexica (Aztec) mythology, I have to say that the temple vines remind me most of the Mexica god Xochipilli, “Prince of Flowers,” who a lot of people identify with the sacrifice to Tezcatlipoca/Xipe Totec, a beautiful youth who dances up the pyramid to be “shucked” at the top, turned into “red maize,” his skin donned by the priest who kills him, who then dances down the pyramid to prove the sacrifice is still “alive” and the harvest will be good that year. There’s a famous statue of Xochipilli (later repurposed as Survivor’s Immunity Challenge idol) sitting on top of a base carved with sacred and psychoactive vegetation, including one unidentified flower. Since all people who go to the temple in The Ruins seem to be assumed to be ixiptla, sacrifices, could that unidentified flower be a representation of the flowers of the vine, living creatures somehow identified with Xochipilli? (For a while, I was convinced that the reason the Mayan leader kills the kid who throws a rock at Amy is because he’s trying to damage her, as if her contact with the vine renders her not simply contagious but also inviolable, untouchable — they can kill her if she tries to leave, but they can’t damage her.)
Poor, sad Amy, a nerdy, glasses-wearing photographer masquerading in baby-doll dresses and bikinis, existentially depressed unless she’s drunk enough to be reckless. All this is her fault when you get down to it, but Malone perfectly communicates Scott Smith’s impression that she never expected anything better out of life, no matter what sort of ending test audiences might have “forced” Carter Smith to slap onto the film. She’s the kind of girl who loses everything, even when she wins.
Sandra: There’s a great line in the book: “She complained too much; everyone said so. She was a gloomy person. She didn’t have the gift of happiness; somewhere along the way someone had neglected to give it to her, and now she made everyone else suffer for her lack of it.”
Amy (or rather, in the book, Stacy) is a person who will never truly be able to find her bliss; being trapped in an ancient temple, watching her friends die one by one, and getting eaten by sentient, sadistic, carnivorous flowers, is just about what she thought she’d get from life. Of course, in the movie version Amy survives. Which is kind of a cheat. I’d have liked it better if she’d gotten away at first, but then the Mayans had hunted her down. And then razed the jungle everywhere around her. Nuke the place from orbit!
The film questions us: what would you do to survive? The easy and true answer is of course: anything. The harder questions are: What would you not do? What would you not become? And when it becomes clear that survival is no longer an option, what would you do then? Maybe the bravest thing to do is: nothing. Even as Stacy descends into hysteria and Amy becomes more determined, their roles reversed, it’s really Stacy who knows the right solution: Kill me.
Near the end of the book version, we get this from Stacy (film-Amy), after she has nearly lost her mind: “Who am I? she was thinking once again. Am I still me?”
These are the questions of a Final Girl who doesn’t make it. And these are the questions of our own existence. We spend our lives trying to answer them, and they sit with us at the end, in our last moments, perhaps unanswered, as we get to the ultimate question. The one we’ll all get the answer to one day, whether we want it or not.
Cocktail: Wall-arita
Sandra: When looking for a cocktail to go with The Ruins, I obviously wanted something that was tropical, seemed sunny, and yet somehow felt ominous. And Great Gods of Google, you did not fail me! The Wall-arita simply looks perfect — it has all the right flavors but it kind of looks carnivorous and terrifying. And beautiful.
- 1 ½ ounces Ilegal mezcal
- ¾ ounce Mi Campo tequila
- ¾ ounce passion fruit syrup
- ¾ ounce fresh lime juice
- Tajín Clásico seasoning, for the rim
- ¼ ounce chicha morada (Peruvian nonalcoholic beverage made from purple corn, pineapple, cloves, and cinnamon), for swirl
- Orchid flower and pequin peppers, for garnish
Combine first four ingredients in a shaker. Fill with ice and shake until thoroughly chilled, about 15 seconds. Rim glass with Tajín. Fill glass with fresh ice and strain into both glasses. Swirl chicha morada around the edge of glass. Garnish with orchid (or carnivorous plant of your choice) and pequin peppers.
(Cocktail created by Christian Armando Guillén.)
For those of you who do not have the Tajín Clásico seasoning, it’s made from dried and ground red chilies, sea salt, and dehydrated lime juice. I think you could get a similar flavor if you dipped the glass in fresh lime juice, and then in a mix of chili powder and salt. Perhaps not authentic, but in the ballpark. Or, you can order the seasoning direct from Amazon!
If you can’t get chicha morada, you could always make your own, or if you are feeling lazy like me, you could just combine some pineapple juice, cinnamon, cloves, lemons, maybe a dash of apple juice in quantities that seem tasty to you and go from there. You won’t get the purple corn flavor, but still pretty tasty! And again, Amazon has it! I mean, yeah, Amazon is the devil, but sometimes — too good to pass up.
Book Recommendations
Sandra: Scott Smith’s The Ruins, obviously. What a terrifying and beautiful book. It has the flavor of a locked-room mystery, but is set entirely outdoors. Man vs. Nature, with Man coming out way, way behind. And a much bleaker ending.
I really think that I have to recommend Gemma’s own Hexslinger series here. Because there are ancient Mayan/Aztec gods, human sacrifice, supernatural doings, and all kinds of other fun things. Start with the first one, A Book of Tongues, and work your way through the trilogy with A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones. Or if you want to get ’em all in one, there’s the Hexslinger Omnibus, which has the added bonus of three bonus stories set in the same world. Violent, beautifully written and gay AF, it’s not to be missed.
Gemma: Whoo, okay. 😉 I’m going to nominate Beauty by Brian D’Amato (Island, 1992) — a remarkably odd book that reminds me of a hybrid of Frankenstein and Less Than Zero — (a) because I think more people should read it in general and (b) because the main character, an insane artists turned off-the-books plastic surgeon, thinks of himself as an Aztec priest making lumpy normal human clay into something so beautiful it literally hurts to look at, creating gods on earth. I’ll also nominate Lisa Tuttle’s short story “Sun City” (from her collection A Nest of Nightmares), the first time I ran across Xipe Totec imagery used in a horror format, and Vonda N. McIntyre’s short story “Aztecs,” which . . . isn’t horror per se, but it really gets the point across. Check out a rundown of it here that accurately charts its impact.
Sandra Kasturi is the publisher of ChiZine Publications, winner of the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and HWA Specialty Press Awards. She is the co-founder of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium and the Executive Director of the Chiaroscuro Reading Series, and a frequent guest speaker, workshop leader, and panelist at genre conventions. Sandra is also an award-winning poet and writer, with work appearing in various venues, including Amazing Stories, Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, Prairie Fire, several Tesseracts anthologies, Evolve, Chilling Tales, ARC Magazine, Taddle Creek, Abyss & Apex, Stamps, Vamps & Tramps, and 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin. She recently won the Sunburst Award for her short story, “The Beautiful Gears of Dying,” in the anthology The Sum of Us. Her two poetry collections are: The Animal Bridegroom (with an introduction by Neil Gaiman) and Come Late to the Love of Birds. Sandra is currently working on another poetry collection, Snake Handling for Beginners, a story collection, Mrs. Kong & Other Monsters, and a novel, Wrongness: A False Memoir. She is fond of red lipstick, gin & tonics, and Idris Elba.
Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work, two chap-books of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy, a story-cycle and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst award for Best Adult Novel). Most are available from ChiZine Publications. She has two new story collections from Trepidatio (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places), one upcoming from Cemetery Dance (Dark Is Better), and a new poetry collection from Aqueduct Press (Invocabulary).
I haven’t seen this yet, but now I really want to!
I remember hearing about this movie but never saw it. Now I’ve been watching clips on YouTube and apparently there was an alternate ending – Amy did die, but somehow managed to get out to the point that they had a funeral and buried her and everything. Then a groundskeeper strolls up whistling and the flowers growing over her grave mimic it. Of course he touches them and it cuts to black. Dunno how she managed to get that far with vines partying under her skin but eh, movie liberties I guess!
Whaaaaat?! How on earth have I not seen this! Definitely have to look this up. Thanks!!
[…] 10: Episode 10: The Ruinous Ruins, featuring the film adaptation of Scott Smith’s The Ruins + The […]
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