Cinefantastique Online

In “THE RUINS: A Different Horror Experience,” KentNews.net gives the cast a forum to explain why their film is different from the run-of-the-mill horror outing:

[Shawn] Ashmore confessed that unlike most scary movies, the film mostly takes place in broad daylight, giving the movie a sense of realism.

“It’s amazing because you can’t hide from anything at all,” Ashmore said. “This makes it creepier because you can’t turn away.”

THE RUINS Aims for primal fears: Producer Chris Bender and director Carter Smith add their two cents:

Bender was a big fan of A Simple Plan, an earlier Scott Smith novel which earned the writer an Oscar nomination when he converted it into an outstanding film. The Ruins offered a complete change of pace and genre with a story in which people’s lives and personalities are changed forever by an encounter with killer plants, and Bender wanted to ensure that he didn’t betray the original.

“It could have gone one of two ways once we got a director in there,” Bender said a few weeks ago. “This could either have devolved into an incredibly cheesy killer-plant movie or it could play with the viewers’ psyches in ways that are a lot more intriguing and sinister, making this the true original it was on the page.”

Carter Smith says he felt like “a kid in a candy store” when he was given the chance to direct The Ruins. But he also knew he had superior material to work with - a character-driven screenplay about people coping with both an exterior menace and the demons in their own nature.

“It’s a really great script, and there’s a lot of stellar character stuff, and of course having actors like Jena Malone and Jonathan Tucker and Joe Anderson and Laura Ramsay and Shawn Ashmore meant that they would bring a lot to the roles - a lot of texture and a lot of subtlety. That’s something people aren’t really used to in the genre.”

THE RUINS adds to classic horror genre: Writer Scott Smith discusses adapting his novel into the screenplay for the film:

There are immediately so many more voices and constraints and pressures on the screenwriter,” he says. “I go in very much having made my peace with that. I feel like someone’s paid a lot of money to make a movie out of it, and I’m being hired to paint someone’s house, as opposed to painting my own house.”

The one idea everyone agreed on was that the psychological element of the novel had to be prominent in the film. Smith says first-time director Carter Smith “was very much aligned with where the book was coming from” and that he agreed that it was a film in which “the horror came out of the people as opposed to, or in addition to, the obvious monster aspect.”