All of Carter Smith’s dead boys

An interview with the director of ‘Swallowed’ and ‘The Ruins’

“There’s a whole weird, dark web of fucked-up shit happening in my mind,” horror director Carter Smith tells me. He’s talking about his photo series All the Dead Boys, which is part horror and part porn, perfectly walking the line between sexy and scary. The drop-dead-gorgeous models in his pictures are often bloodied or bruised, sometimes smeared with dirt or sporting weird lesions, and the series is both arousing and shocking. “Is it sexy?” he wants viewers to ask. “I want to look… but I want to look away.” He likes that tension.

That same ethos carries over into Swallowed, Smith’s new film about two beautiful boys who find themselves trapped in a drug-smuggling nightmare. When Dom (Jose Colon) and Benjamin (Cooper Koch) make a run over the Canadian border, they are forced by Alice (Jena Malone), the no-nonsense gun-toting woman in charge, to swallow the baggies to make sure they’re safe. She warns the guys that they’d better hope the bags don’t burst inside them before coming out the other end. But this is, of course, a horror movie; a gay-bashing incident at a rest stop means that the boys’ bodies soon turn against them from within. What ensues is a twisted, disgusting film that nonetheless crackles with queer sexuality and a can’t-believe-they’re-going-there…