The Ruins, and Some Story Hypothesis

When I wasn't rewriting DR or slugging champagne with the A-bomb, I spent my weekend reading The Ruins, by Scott Smith.

This book is awesome.

Here's the set-up: four college friends (two couples) decide to spend a couple of weeks in Cancun. It's the summer between college graduation and the real world, their last chance to just relax and fuck around like college students before they have to grow up. They get to hanging with a German guy named Mathias, who's bent out of shape because he got into an argument with his brother over a girl he'd met. The brother hasn't been heard from since he set off into the jungle to profess his love. (The chick's an archaeologist). Sitting around on the beach is getting boring, so the four Americans decide to go with Mathias to look for his brother. It sounds like a fun, day-long romantic adventure, a story they can tell about their time in Cancun besides, "Got drunk, fucked and swam for two weeks."

At the last minute, they're joined by a Greek guy they got drunk with the night before. He doesn't speak a word of English, but he's a fun guy, so they bring him along. He doesn't even tell them his real name. The Greek guy says he's "Pablo."

The six ride a bus to a little town. From the town, they hire a "taxi" -- this dude with a pickup truck. The guy drives them down a long, twisting path, following the hand-drawn map Mathias's brother left behind. When the driver realizes where they're going, he does everything he can to talk them out of it. But only one guy among their crew speaks Spanish, and he's determined to help Mathias. They ignore the "taxi driver."

Our heroes find a tiny Mayan village. They try to get some information: have you seen an archaeological dig around here? Have you seen a German guy looking for his girlfriend? But they only get blank stares. The Mayans only speak Mayan.

Just as they're about to turn back, one of the group happens upon a carefully-hidden path leading into the jungle. This must be the way to the dig. But why has it been hidden? No matter. They didn't come all the way out here just to give up. The crew forges ahead...

And that's where I'll leave off, because I don't want to spoil anything about this incredible novel. I can easily say it has one of the most evil villains I've seen in anything in a long time. In a word: malevolent. What these six people trip over is the worst news in the world.

It's a story about miscommunication. The novel's written in third-person, trading active POV between the four American characters. We never see the story through the eyes of Mathias or the Greek guy. Mathias is fluent in German and English, but the Greek guy speaks no English, the Americans and Mathias speak no Greek, only one American speaks Spanish, no one speaks Mayan, and the Mayans only know their native language. And the Americans constantly miscommunicate, misinterpret and ignore each other. Instead of working together to save their asses, they spend most of the time bickering and fucking around. The only two relatively sane characters are the only multi-lingual characters. I don't think this is a coincidence.

The Ruins is also a "DON'T GO THERE" story. I have a hypothesis that most stories have their deepest roots in the earliest days of our species. And I believe DON'T GO THERE is the earliest and simplest horror story.

Imagine two cave men happening across a valley they haven't seen before. They check it out. A sabre-toothed tiger pounces on one of them. His buddy hauls ass back to the cave where his tribe lives and yells "Ooga-ooga-ooga!" Which translates to: "Me and Ug found a valley. A tiger ate Ug. If you don't want to get eaten, too... DON'T GO THERE."

The tribe passes down the story. As a rule, they DON'T GO THERE. The story continues from one generation to the next. Long after the tigers are gone, the valley is still considered taboo. Maybe now it's haunted by Ug's ghost.

I think story is the basic unit of currency in human communication. Story serves a lot of purposes, including the earliest versions of survival instruction. DON'T GO THERE is just a sub-genre of DON'T DO THAT, this being a list of things you shouldn't do if you want to stay alive in a hostile world. There's a rich tradition of DON'T DO THAT horror stories.

All haunted house-type horror stories are derivations on DON'T GO THERE. (For example, the fake trailer Edgar Wright did for Grindhouse, simply called Don't). The characters always get a warning, which they always ignore. Because it's been a long time since we've lived in caves and had to worry about silly shit like sabre-toothed tigers living in a certain valley. Right...?

That's why The Ring and Ju-On freaked the shit out of me. They're DON'T GO THERE stories without any warning. How are you supposed to know not to watch this unmarked video tape? How are you supposed to avoid going into this innocuous suburban house? It's not like the Ju-On house has bats and lightning bolts and an organ playing. They're movies that say we live in a malevolent world, where you can lose the game without even knowing you're playing until it's over. Psycho plays on this, too. The Bates motel is creepy and all, but it's not like Janet Leigh's been warned that people who stay there have a habit of not coming back out. (Spoiler).

The Ruins is also in the tradition of horror stories where the characters think they're going to just do something fun off the beaten path, and end up in a world of shit. This seems to be the core of a lot of psycho family-type movies. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, they're just stopping to visit a house where a couple of the characters used to spend summers. The Hills Have Eyes has the family detouring to see an silver mine they inherited. There's kind of a warning, in that the characters always realize the trip might be a bit of a pain in the ass, there's a slight chance things could go south. But it's so minor that (as in The Ruins) anybody who complains gets voted down as a worrier.

American Werewolf in London is an interesting variation. The two guys are on vacation. They get tons of warning. As they leave the pub, they're told very clearly to STAY ON THE ROAD. Naturally, they lose the road in the fog...

These aren't quite DON'T GO THERE stories. I'm tempted to call them STAY ON THE ROAD stories. But I think the roots are deeper, going back before we had roads. Since trouble always befalls people who wander off, STAY ON THE ROAD is likely a derivation of the base story STAY NEAR THE CAMPFIRE. (And, if leaving the campfire is the triggering action, we see the true base of the story is DON'T DO THAT).

Seeing as these dooms befall characters when they go out into the wilderness, it seems in our contemporary consciences that cities and urban centers have replaced the campfire. It's the core fear of leaving the city and facing danger in the country.

STAY ON THE ROAD stories aren't necessarily horror movies; we get a lot of thrillers, too: Duel, Joy Ride, Breakdown, The Hitcher, Deliverance, etc. Any movie that uses an empty gas tank or pissing off rednecks as a plot element is a STAY ON THE ROAD movie.

My own script Desert Run is a STAY ON THE ROAD. After a magazine photo shoot, the crew and models jump in some Land Rovers and drive around the Tabernas Desert. It's supposed to just be something fun they do for the extra day off before everyone packs up and goes back to New York. Of course, plot point one shows them the error of their ways.

The Ruins is a combination of DON'T GO THERE and STAY ON THE ROAD. It's a fast read, creepy and tense and laden with doom. On a side note, it's by the same guy who wrote A Simple Plan. I can see the similarities: both are about well-meaning people who get dragged down to hell by their own choices. I've seen the movie, which is brilliant. I didn't intend to read the book until now.

I always read the acknowledgements and thank yous in books. This is mostly because my name sometimes appears in these things, and I like the idea that someone besides me and the author and my mom 'n' dad will see it.

I noticed Ben Stiller and Stuart Cornfeld (Ben Stiller's producing partner) get thanks from Scott Smith for their input. Their company, Red Hour, is producing the film adaptation of The Ruins. Huh. It's not unusual for a producer to adapt a novel, perhaps even optioning it at the galley stage. It's rare for a film producer to get involved so early in the process that they have input on the actual novel. (Unless, of course, it's a novel written by a client of a management/production company --I did a lot of development work on Demonkeeper and Forecast, for instance, but had nothing to do with the writing of Three Men Seeking Monsters).

I'd be interested to learn how Red Hour came to be involved...