In my fledgling days of horror fandom, browsing the new release aisle at the local retailers was a weekly tradition. Every Tuesday, I would hit my electronics store of choice, scouring the shelves for fresh cover art that evoked the scary, disturbing or macabre. So it was in July of 2008 that my eyes landed excitedly upon The Ruins.
I had heard of it, but was generally unfamiliar with the story. I think I might have seen the trailer before something, maybe a TV spot. Either way, it was horror and it was new, so I was bringing it home for my wife and I to watch, sight unseen. Plus, it helped that it seemed to be about some kind of killer weed.
While my wife is generally willing to watch most anything I show up with, she has a certain proclivity toward movies that deal with the horrors of the natural world. That is, she is far more inclined to stay awake through a feature’s runtime if the villain is a plant as opposed to a hulking figure wielding an axe. As it was, The Ruins was right up her alley.
The movie floored us. Not only because of its raw realism in the face of something so fantastic, but because of the unflinching grotesquery inflicted on and to the narrative’s protagonists. The movie was the first in a while to make me flinch, wince and verbally cry out, mumble or moan in a long while. I was naively beginning to consider myself something of a strong-stomached horror aficionado, but this film proved me indelibly wrong.
After it was all over, my wife was so won over that she sought out the novel of the same name that the film was based on. She discovered that, like the screenplay, it was penned by Scott B. Smith, and was instantly engrossed. The book offered insight into the characters thoughts and feelings that a film never could. Still, as my wife and I discussed the differences, we kept coming back to one scene that seemed to crystallize the entire experience of both the film and the book — and what made the experience of the story as a whole so utterly disturbing.
In the film, Jeff, soon to be a doctor, is faced with a decision. Mathias, a German man they’ve only known for a day or so, is in bad shape and his legs are shredded husks of their former selves. Jeff knows he has to amputate, less Mathias die of infection. But he doesn’t have the right equipment, the right help and he certainly can’t guarantee that he won’t accidentally kill Mathias in the process.
The decision is a terrible one, one of many challenging, moral dilemmas the characters face in the film’s runtime. The narrative plays like a social experiment, forcing five people into seclusion, encased by death itself and an inevitable, encroaching doom, if only to see how they might react. The decision to amputate Mathias’ legs is the epitome of this thematic through line and stands as one of the most gruesome and agonizing moments in a narrative comprised of trauma and fear.
The screenplay transposes this sensibility into the scene in an overt manner, despite the narrative differences, embodying the directness associated with a more visual medium. And, together, the screenplay and the film form a fascinating view into the crazed minds of people who want to do good, want to survive but are forced to do the unthinkable in an effort to transform those wants into realities.
THE SCENE
Jeff offers Mathias a swig of Tequila. He gives Mathias a folded belt to bite down on and then asks Stacy and Amy to wait in the tent. He returns to Mathias and instructs Eric to hold the man down. He raises a rock with some cloth, which has been heating in a fire, and slams it down on Mathias’s right leg. Mathias screams. Jeff sets to work sawing the flesh. He pulls off the leg and grabs the frying pan from the nearby flame, cauterizing the wound. He proceeds to the next leg, Mathias’s screams still resounding shrilly. Amy and Stacy moan in the tent, attempting to drown out the event. At the base of the temple, their captors wait. When it’s over, Amy and Stacy exit the tent, confronting Jeff. Amy accuses him of misrepresenting Mathias’ ability to feel pain. But their argument is interrupted by the flowing vines, entering the clearing to retrieve the discarded body parts that Jeff had so recently hacked off. The group watches helplessly.
THE SCRIPT
THE SCREEN
The screenplay opens on a close up of a SMALL PILE OF CLOTHES, presumably to maintain the level of intimacy that the film and audience share. The film, however, is methodical in its execution, showing what is necessary while still taking the appropriate amount of time to build to the inevitable horror. It begins on a medium close up shot of Jeff offering a swig of tequila to Mathias. An act of mercy, an unnecessary beat of caring that continues to inform the moral struggle onscreen.
The day is bright and sunny. The characters’ dirty, brusque visages stand in direct contrast to the beautiful landscape surrounding them. Their demeanours are hollow and drained, wasted away to stoic, watchful things, forced to again bear witness to a suffering that mere days before would have been unfathomable to them. Wide reaction shots pepper the opening of this sequence, establishing this sense of mood and distance that’s growing between the characters.
The screenplay sets the stage with detailed Action Description, depicting Eric dribbling tequila onto the clothes in preparation for the fire, the stone shaped like an ax head and the metal canteen from the orange tent. This continues until Eric strikes a match and watches the fire burning with a low blue flame. Throughout this, Jeff is delivering his preparatory exposition to Mathias, letting him know exactly how he plans to remove the man’s legs.
“I’ll have to break the bones first. With the stone. Then I’ll use the knife to cut through.”
In the film, Jeff still delivers his scripted lines, but all together and more directly. The camera does not float around the stage eyeing the instruments and mechanics of the event in question. Those things are certainly there and visible, if one were to look, but the focus of the moment is shared between Jeff and Mathias. While the script wanted to build tension through preparedness, the film opts to do so by way of direct interpersonal communication, laying out precisely what is going to happen and how.
The script and the film initially build to Jeff’s line, “Just in case” as he holds up one of the belts.” Mathias nods, providing Jeff with an incredibly forlorn, aching look as he bites down on the belt. It’s a moment of recognition, acceptance that nothing Jeff is saying is for absolute certain but still acknowledging that the sentiments come from a place of good intent. All of this is depicted in tight close up shots, the dirt, sweat and blood clear in the shimmering sun, making them look all the more weathered and brow-beaten.
Jeff turns to Eric and asks, “Ready?” In the script Eric nods and then describes how The stone is making a cracking sound in the fire glowing deep red. Rather than showing a symbolic object gaining strength from the fire which seeks to tear it apart, the film holds on Eric who simply stares forward unresponsively. The image does not cut to the cracking rock, rather allows the viewer to get a glimpse into Eric’s uncertainty, his innate humanity.
The script continues in this vein, depicting Jeff as calling over his shoulder to the girls waiting behind him. In the film, Jeff rises and approaches them in a wide shot. Amy stands motionless while Stacy sits awkwardly on the ground. Only Jeff’s legs are visible in the foreground when he speaks: “You should wait in the tent.” The moment feels oddly impersonal given the intimacy on display seconds earlier, this being the act of a doctor attempting to control, not a friend desperate to comfort.
In the screenplay, Amy protests and Stacy stands, grabbing her hand, pulling her across the clearing, and she lets herself be led. In the film, Amy grabs Stacy instead, pulling her to the tent. This alteration serves to reveal an understanding of Jeff that can only come from knowing him as well as Amy does. There is a trust on display that holds weight and again brings a closeness to the proceedings.
In a medium shot, Jeff returns to Mathias after watching the girls vanish through the flap. Then, the script wastes no time:
He scoops up the stone, raises it over his head, SLAMS it down with all his strength against the exposed bone of Mathias’s left leg.
The film follows Jeff in close ups, interspersing shots of Mathias and Eric, as he meticulously sets to work. Removing his emotion from the equation, Jeff instructs Eric to “grab his feet” and then, a moment later, “that foot. Turn it up.” The dialogue seems small and unimportant, but those touches show the transformation Jeff is able to make in that instant, transitioning into a kind of calculated level headedness that his counterparts are unable to embody.
Eric obeys the instruction but there is a quietness about the interaction, an unsettling calm before the inevitable storm. That’s when Jeff raises the rock.
The stone connects with the bone with a shattering, squelching snap. The angle of the shot is low and the cut is quick. Mathias is laid out in the frame and his foot kicks up as the rock connects, the rotting flesh reverberating disgustingly with the blow. In the screenplay, Mathias bucks, GROANING. In the film, Mathias screams: an unfettered, pained, guttural series of shouts and moans that plays as a soundtrack for the amputation over the following collection of seconds.
The screenplay describes the amputation with gory detail, mirroring the strategy of the scene’s set up. The film takes all of it in stride, again ensuring to insert reaction close up shots displaying Eric’s skyrocketing uncertainty and Mathias’s unbearable pain.
Jeff starts to saw with the knife, chopping and cutting the splintered bones. Bloody marrow spills wetly out, and then Mathias’s lower leg comes free of his body, the foot and the ankle and shin bones completely separate now.
The film smartly doesn’t move right to the carnage, rather begins the sawing on a close up of Jeff. The viewer sees him setting to work, fighting to stay calm and collected, to get through it. Then the perspective is back on Mathias, a lower angle this time, as he squirms and shouts, raising his head in attempt to see what’s happening to the lower half of his body.
That’s when the audience sees the legs on full display. The knife cutting roughly through the filthy, rotting flesh as the meat encrusted bone slowly starts to pull away. Bone marrow may not be “spilling out”, but the bloody shreds of legs look nothing if not wet. The shot then returns to Mathias, disgusted and pained by his own form and fast losing nerve regarding the whole idea. Jeff then delivers a line that the script called him to say before he started the act: “Hold him down.”
Eric’s uncertainty has turned to anger, but he obeys. The shot cuts to a close up, low angle from the base of Mathias’s foot just as Jeff pulls the remaining portion of Mathias’s right leg out of his thigh with a loud, wet squelch. A long, in tact bone slides out of the sinew, gleaming in the sunlight. Jeff moves quickly now, the camera following his every move. He grabs the frying pan from the fire and presses it hard against Mathias’s freshly crafted stump.
He presses the canteen flat against Mathias’s stump, the flesh SIZZLING and SPITTING.
The viewer only sees the pan (in lieu of a canteen) connect with Mathias for a second or two, so it’s the searing sound of cooking meat and the outrageous reactions of the characters that truly makes the moment land. In the background, Eric leans in and begins shouting at Jeff, begging him to stop. Jeff doesn’t react, holding the pan against Mathias unfazed. The screenplay calls for this same turn, however with more emotion, Eric looks increasingly mortified; he seems close to tears.
The image cuts to the tent, returning to Amy and Stacy. The screenplay calls for Amy to be staring toward the flap with a look of horror. In the film, Amy is calming Stacy, telling her “it’s okay”. The scene passes as they cover their ears and moan as they attempt to block out the harsh reality of their decisions and, worse yet, their predicament at large.
Upon returning to the amputation, the screenplay reads, Jeff saws and chops at the shattered bones with the knife. The film returns with a similar image of Jeff from earlier in the scene, holding the large rock high above his head. After a slight, but revealing, pause, he screws up his face and thrusts the rock down.
As the crack resounds loudly, the camera finds itself at the bottom of the temple, situated in a camp of the locals which have condemned the protagonists to death by holding them in the place of the vines. The scene does not appear in the script. It’s quiet, depicting several women preparing food and a man sitting completely stationary at the edge of the sand, a sentinel in charge of protecting the world from what lies within. The chaos of Mathias’s amputation is audible in the distance, a waning cry of the sacrifice which has to be made so that others may survive.
The alternate perspective is one of the only times the film leaves the group of people on the temple, offering yet another opinion on the futility of the pain some insist on inflicting upon themselves in the stead of survival. The screenplay, instead, continues to follow Jeff as he carefully removes the second leg, culminating with: Mathias finally passes out, his body going slack, his screams falling SILENT.
When the film returns to Jeff, he is finishing the second leg in a close up. The image cuts to Mathias who is weak, seemingly without much fight left in him. As scripted, Amy emerges from the tent, then Stacy. The film adds the detail of Eric vomiting as he stumbles away in a wide shot, just as Jeff finally cauterizes the second stump. The act sparks Amy to shout, “Jeff!”
The group reconvenes in the clearing atop the temple, in the same space where they decided to commit to the amputation in the first place. The scripted dialogue plays out more or less the same way in the film, with some word choice adjustments that feel more natural but that don’t affect the intended meaning. For example changing Amy’s line, “This is bad, Jeff. So bad” to “THIS IS SO NOT OKAY!”
The film juxtaposes Amy’s bombastic emotion against Jeff’s more collected stance, distilling the conflicting reactionary mindsets of different types of people when considering an appropriate moral path. This amplified tenfold given that life itself is on the line. The shots open up a bit here, growing wider and allowing for more characters to occupy the frame. As Jeff’s singular authority is questioned and additional personalities encroach, the photography widens to allow for it.
Jeff argues “we didn’t have a choice, Amy” and Stacy attempts to interject, “Amy…” but is interrupted. The script reads: Amy SCREAMS. The film, however, chooses to have Amy react in desperation, with an almost noiseless, breathy despair as she points toward Mathias’s amputated limbs.
A vine has come snaking into the clearing: it’s wrapping itself around one of the feet.
In the script there is a fight of sorts: Eric grabs the knife, jumps up, steps on the first tendril, bends to slash at it with the blade. More tendrils come after him and, like heads on a hydra, the more of them he cuts down, the more there are that seem to pop up. Stacy screams again and eventually Eric decides that this is a fight he cannot win.
After, the script reads: There’s a beat of stillness, and then, once more, echoing up toward them from the shaft, comes that faint electronic RINGING of the cell phone. The ringing plays like a cruel glimmer of hope to the characters so desperate to find it, but an ominously timed death knell as well.
In the film, not one but a mass of vines move over the temple like small waves, slowly pulling the discarded limbs deeper into its thick collection of leaves as the tide returns objects back to the ocean floor. Each character turns to look in their own respective close up, the hope leaving their eyes. The final shot pulls back into an aerial wide of the temple, a place completely overrun by the vine, with four small people standing atop it. Four people with no recourse but to wait. To die.
There is no ringing sound drifting toward them, rather the silence of death which has rooted itself in that spot. Humanity’s will to survive refuses to let itself succumb to such traps, but in that moment, it becomes quite clear to all involved, the illusion of hope may be far more dangerous than the reality of acceptance.
THE BLOODY CONCLUSION
“Every single person in the theater shifts in their seat…” director Carter Smith remarked about the amputation scene on his commentary track found on The Ruins blu-ray release (Available here), “they just know what’s coming.”
Much like the characters in the story, I was wholly unprepared for what I was to encounter in The Ruins. These days, it is becoming more and more rare that a horror fan is able to stumble into a movie completely blind, without expectation or knowledge. Such an experience places the viewer and the film’s protagonists on the same playing field and makes for a markedly different experience.
It’s a film comprised of many shocking moments and one that will remain with me for as long as my horror fandom will carry me. Moreover, it’s a film my wife and I still talk about to this day, one of the few horror films we both bring up when people ask us why we love the genre so much.
However, for me, nothing distills the impact of the film’s ethical and survivalist dilemmas more than Mathias’s double amputation. The page builds out the sequence in excruciating detail and the screen spared no gory expense in bridging those words into sharp, painful reality.
“We did that basically all day… we cut his legs off for, you know, 9 hours,” Carter Smith said on his commentary track, “[we did it] over and over and over and over and over to get it right.”
“We went and got real lumps of raw meat and just watched how they moved and sagged and hit the ground,” Jason Baird, the Prosthetic Supervisor for The Ruins, said in the feature “Creeping Death” found on the blu-ray disc. He discusses the variety of different legs that were created for the various shots, the hole in the ground constructed to hide Mathias’s actual legs and the sort of “jump suit” that was created for the actor’s body so that the legs and groin area could be interchangeable.
I carried that scene with me long after the movie had reached its finish, the culmination of a theme that Carter Smith summarized perfectly in his commentary: “All of this violence comes out of people trying to help each other.” When I discovered the book, that thematic was deepened even further. The novel offered similar events in what felt like an alternate universe, offering character scenarios that contrast to what occurred to those same characters in the film. By the end of reading it, I not only enjoyed the base story more, I had a deeper appreciation for the genre at large and what it was ultimately capable of. That is to say, the book and the film each expand the horizons of the other.
The Ruins may have been an offhanded discovery in my weekly perusal of the new release shelf, but it stands as evidence as to why such a tradition can be so important. One’s love of art can be made or broken by discovery; in essence, expansion. Sure, it’s a risk. Sometimes you come home with The Wicker Man (2006) remake. But, sometimes, you push aside the branches and find yourself staring at The Ruins. For that I’ll forever be grateful to Scott B. Smith, and, of course, my wife, the avid reader.
Still, when I think about the film, my mind will always return to the amputation. The looks on the characters faces. The pain in their eyes, emotionally and physically. A moment that will be etched into my cinematic memory forever. But that’s what the medium is all about, stirring visuals that crystallize a moment, its message and its feeling.
Carter Smith recognized this too, saying in his commentary, “it was one of the first things that I showed to the actors.” He laughed, imitating himself from back then, saying in a playful, faux-innocent voice: “you wanna see something?”
For, of course, horror is a two sided coin. As wonderful as it is to be moved to deep, thought provoking soul searching by what the genre has to offer, it’s also pretty great to just… freak people out. Given this particular scene in The Ruins, it’s safe to say that Carter Smith clearly understood the merits of both.
The Ruins (2008): Written by Scott B. Smith & Directed by Carter Smith
