THE RUINS (2008) is a potent allegory for an America tearing itself apart over terrorism
#31DaysOfHorror: October 9
This October, I’ll be reviewing 31 horror movies in 31 days! You can see the ongoing list of what I’ve watched and reviewed here.
The Plot
Four American friends are on vacation in Mexico. They’re spending their vacation on the beach, enjoying the sun, the sand, and some drinks when they meet a German named Mathias. He offers to take them to visit Mayan ruins to meet up with his brother and his girlfriend, so they head out into the jungle. When they find the ruins, they are immediately set up on by locals, and soon they are trapped at the top of the pyramid, tangled among the vines…
My Review
The Ruins is a strange movie. It’s very competently made and filmed; the colors are gorgeous, the action is tense, and it’s well-acted. The plot is straightforward but not simple, and it includes a number of memorable setpieces. Yes, the evil vines are a bit silly on the surface, but understanding the film in the context of other torture porn films from the same decade reveals The Ruins as an allegory for an America destroying itself over the War on Terror.
One particular subgenre of American horror in the noughties involved Americans going to other countries where they didn’t belong, and being brutally torn to pieces because of it. Films like Turistas, Borderlands, and most famously Hostel and its sequels punish Americans in grotesque, gory ways for being outside of their borders, and for not respecting the local culture, feeling they have a right to go where they please and behave however they like.
These films frequently highlighted gore, focusing on depicting the desecration and destruction of the (American) human body. While the “torture porn” genre was derided in popular press as a worthless, grotesque exercise in sadism, several critics in the years since the genre has fallen out of favor have started to situate these films in a particularly post-9/11, mid-Iraq War context. For example, in his article “The Subject of Torture: Regarding the Pain of Americans in Hostel,” Jason Middleton compares the way Hostel makes visible the corporal reality of torture to the way The Texas Chain Saw Massacre depicted meat production.
“Where Chainsaw thematizes the horrific “un-repression” of a mode of commodity production that middle-class society would prefer to keep out of sight and out of mind, Hostel adapts this structure of reversal for the context of the contemporary American “war on terror” and the positions of torturer and tortured. Where the working-class labor of meat production represents the repressed in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the analogous object in the thematics of Hostel is the United States’ dirty business in the “war on terror” — the abuses that are intended to stay hidden from view.”
The Ruins certainly fits a lot of aspects of this subgenre of torture porn. The characters are Americans who feel they have the right to be any place they like, and their ignorance is what gets (most of) them killed. Like the characters in many torture porn films, they are slowly driven insane by the methodical mutilation of their bodies. The film does not shy away from showing the gore, either, in a way that Aaron Michael Kerner calls “medicalized.” That is, the gore isn’t just a byproduct of being shot or stabbed (although it is sometimes that) — instead, there are numerous scenes where the characters are performing a sort of makeshift surgery on each other, whether it’s removing parasitic vine tendrils from under their skin or amputating infected legs with rocks.
Kerner, however, does not believe the film qualifies as torture porn, even as he acknowledges its relationship to other films in the genre and notes that the movie “negotiates the post-9/11 American experience.” Absent from the movie is a foreign person doing the torturing, which I imagine is why Kerner disqualifies the film from the genre. The vast majority of torture porn films conduct, as Middleton has noted, a reversal of torturer and tortured, putting Americans in the position where usually we put our enemies .
Not so in The Ruins. Here, instead, the antagonists are not really the locals. In actuality, a particularly evil species of vine has taken over the ruined pyramid, and the locals are keeping it at bay, stopping it from spreading to the rest of the world. The vines can move at will, slithering across the ruins and into open wounds, until they drive the Americans mad with fear. Also, the flowers can mimic sound.
I would argue that Kerner is not correct about The Ruins; I think this does qualify as torture porn, and it’s still political, even though there is no non-American human antagonist. Instead, as Kevin Wetmore notes in Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema, the vines can be seen to symbolize terrorism itself. Under the Bush administration (and still), terrorism is frequently a depersonalized concept; the phrase “War on Terror” was often criticized for depicting the war as against an abstract idea rather than against an enemy that could actually be defeated. So, instead of terrorists being represented by organ harvesters or sex traffickers, The Ruins depicts a snaking vine that literally gets under the skin of the Americans, writhing beneath the surface, mimicking their language and culture (i.e. the ringing phone), causing them fear until they destroy each other.
And destroy each other they do. There is no “other” torturing the American bodies in The Ruins. Instead, the gore and mutilation is all inflicted by other people in the group. This is mostly embodied in the character of Jeff (played by Jonathan Tucker). Jeff represents typical American masculinity, chomping at the bit to prove himself while in danger in a foreign country. When they find themselves in jeopardy, Jeff immediately assumes a leadership position. He demands that the girls lower themselves into the ruin to rescue an injured Mathias. He goes down the ruin steps at night to stare menacingly at the locals who are keeping them imprisoned, to no effect whatsoever. He is the one who decides to cut off Mathias’ legs. And he’s the one who leaps at the opportunity to slice open the flesh of the girl with the vines under her skin. Several times, he is associated with fire.
After he slices open Stacy to remove the parasitic vines, she wants to keep going, convinced there are other offshoots squirming around her body. Significantly, she keeps saying “It’s in my head.” He tells her there will be no more cutting, and so she turns the knife on herself, cutting open her own body to root out what’s scaring her.
If we view the vines as abstracted “terror” itself, the ultimate allegory of the film is made clear in these scenes. Wetmore focuses on Amy escaping the ruins and bringing the seeds of terror back with her to her homeland, just as American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq has fostered more anti-American sentiment. That’s certainly valid, but I think Stacy slicing herself open is just as significant. Like Stacy, America itself has allowed fear of terrorism to take root in our own body politic, such that we have sliced away things we once held dear. Terrorism got under our skin, and in our heads. Many torture porn films make us reflect on what our country is doing to other countries in the name of the War on Terror, but not The Ruins; this movie is about what the War on Terror is doing to America. The characters are doing this to each other, and to themselves. And so are we all.
But where can I watch it? The Ruins is streaming on Amazon, via Fullscreen.
