He also decides that they should have someone wait at the bottom of the hill in case Juan and Don Quixote arrive. • My favorite part of the film, where an angry Jeff insists that they'll all get out of this okay somehow, because "Four Americans on a vacation don't just disappear!" was filmed in the aftermath of a long-running period of PG-13-. More answers to obvious questions: Yes, The Ruins the horror movie is a relatively faithful adaptation of The Ruins the novel. Like in this passage–one of my favorites–where one of the tourists, Eric, sits at the bottom of a mine shaft on top of the hill, bleeding from a scraped knee and trying to comfort Pablo, who fell down the shaft and broke his back. He actually gets shot by the locals when everybody first shows up at the hill. As soon as he'd lift his hand, though, the shapes would vanish, only to reappear at some new spot, farther away, and resume their slow, gently bobbing approach. It grows on their clothes as it does in the movie, but if they brush their hands against their clothes, the plantlets get crushed and burn them. The book even acknowledges her smutttiness in a sequence where one of the male leads speculates on who each of their characters would be in the film adaptation of this story: “Well, there are two female parts, right? After Amy steps on the vine-covered hill when attempting to take a picture of the entire group, the men force the group to stay on the vine-covered hill. The guards freak out and start shouting at the child and trying to herd him onto the pyramid with the others, but when he, too, freaks out and doesn't respond quickly enough, they shoot him. If you don't want to take my word for it, ask author Stephen King, who has called The Ruins the book of the summer... Stephen King nailed it. This gap between the book's ambiguity and the film's flat-out obviousness extends throughout the whole scenario. In your book, you’re not constrained by such limitations. 3. It contributes to the slow, ramping-up sense that something is horribly wrong. Necessarily, a movie’s pacing is much tighter than a book’s. Now on to The Ruins, the 2008 film directed by Carter Smith (no relation to the author), which you can currently find on HBOGo. Eric begs her to kill him, as he is too weak to do so himself, and, after pleading with each other, she stabs him in the heart. As the group fashions makeshift rope from one of the tents, Eric discovers that Pablo's back is broken, paralyzing him from the waist down. 15 Erasing Almost All of Frodo’s Heroism. • In the book, the killer vine's juices are acidic, which just adds to everyone's misery–when they pull it off themselves after sleeping, or dig through it to find corpses, it burns them. They can't outthink or outfight or escape it, because it doesn't obey any laws of nature. Directed by Carter Smith, 2008 As he moves closer to the base of the hill, he hears a flock of birds nearby which alert the Mayans to his position. Or maybe it’s just campy horseshit. Of the four main characters, two are typecast as stupid women with as much dimension as the backside of a broken Teva. Jeff returns, infuriated that they drank alcohol with so little water between them, and that Eric has once again cut himself attempting to remove the vine from inside his body. The wound had stopped bleeding again. Pablo actually falls down the well because part of the vine gets tangled up in the winch that's lowering him, and gets crushed, and the acid burns through the rope–in an early indication that the plant really is plotting their deaths. Further, he finds that the Mayans are apparently afraid of the vines, having salted the earth around the hill to keep them at bay, and will kill them if they attempt to leave the hill to prevent the vines from spreading through the spores in the group's clothing.