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Smith based on his own novel, is pretty good. The characters are well written, and the plot as it unfolds takes it's time to play out, which again is refreshing. Most American horror movies seem to want to rush through the opening scenes, to get to the so-called scare moments, but Smith takes time with his plot, as he did with his other script, the brilliant A Simple Plan. This movie isn't as good as that but it is still good. One of the key things is he never explains how or why the temple is doing what it is doing, yet you never really question it.

He allows some intelligence in not only the characters but also in the audience watching. Again, a refreshing change. The performances from the cast are good. The script allows time for the cast to make their characters believable for a horror movie and as the horror and terror mounts, they react in different ways. The direction by Carter Smith is good.

He creates a sense of dread as the the events play out. While the movie is not particularly scary, he creates a sense a good sense of dread, right up to the end, and also doesn't try and cop-out at the end, or allow for some awful twist. Again a welcome change. The movie does have some scenes that are bloody, or graphic and gory, it's not over the top. There is a reason for the violence in the movie, and also the blood and gore. It's not simply there to gross-out the audience though the scene with the makeshift amputation will have that effect, no doubt!!

At a time when most of the American horror movies are either remakes or sequels, it's nice to see a horror movie that while not original at least is different. And for that reason alone, it's worth watching. Enjoy a night in with these popular movies available to stream now with Prime Video. Start your free trial. Find showtimes, watch trailers, browse photos, track your Watchlist and rate your favorite movies and TV shows on your phone or tablet! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Full Cast and Crew. Smith screenplay , Scott B.

Smith novel as Scott Smith. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — The Ruins by Scott B. The Ruins by Scott B. Trapped in the Mexican jungle, a group of friends stumble upon a creeping horror unlike anything they could ever imagine. Two young couples are on a lazy Mexican vacation—sun-drenched days, drunken nights, making friends with fellow tourists. When the brother of one of those friends disappears, they decide to venture into the jungle to look for him. What started out as a f Trapped in the Mexican jungle, a group of friends stumble upon a creeping horror unlike anything they could ever imagine.

What started out as a fun day-trip slowly spirals into a nightmare when they find an ancient ruins site. Hardcover , pages.

The Ruins () - IMDb

Published July 18th by Alfred A. Knopf first published To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Ruins , please sign up. How do you think, why the book is called "The Ruins", if the ruins don't play any role in the story? The hole with the rope was proof mining had …more That is the problem. The hole with the rope was proof mining had gone on searching for gems, etc. Why oh why hasn't Mr.

I loved both his books, its a waste of talent not to carry on. Sajib I finished reading this and I had the same disappointment in my review of the book. I think he's working on some sort of TV series from his IMDb …more I finished reading this and I had the same disappointment in my review of the book. I don't know what that is about. But I really wish he'd written more movies, maybe a sequel to this one telling us what happened to the Greeks.. See all 4 questions about The Ruins…. Lists with This Book. Jul 02, Kemper rated it it was amazing Shelves: Thirteen years later came his second book, The Ruins which instantly became one of my favorite horror novels.

The concept here is dirt simple. In this particular case four American college students, two boy-girl couples, are on vacation in Mexico where they meet several other tourists from all over the world. A German named Mathis tells them that his brother got smitten with a woman and followed her to an archaeological dig in the jungle, and that he needs to retrieve him before their flight home.

The Americans and another Greek fellow decide to join him and set out on an impromptu adventure following a hand drawn map to a remote location. A bunch of unprepared and ill-equipped tourists wander off into the jungle? What could possibly go wrong? After they find themselves trapped on a hilltop by something that defies belief the young people endure thirst, hunger and injuries and have to consider extreme actions in order to survive. A lot of horror is based around punishing people for their actions. Frankenstein gets his monster for daring to try to change the natural order. Jason slaughters teenagers for acting like teenagers.

In The Ruins there is no single moment of arrogance or failure of character to point out as the thing that bring about the situation. Although there are plenty of small examples of rotten behavior that make it that much worse. Smith does a great job of playing off the human nature of being in a bad spot and wondering how you got there only to have the sickening realization that you knew for a while that you heading into trouble, but you somehow talked yourself into staying the course it with the assumption that everything would work itself out.

The characters themselves are a departure from what you get in most horror novels these days. Yeah, I know some people hated them, and they truly are a pack of insufferable dumb asses for a large part of the book. The others also act with varying amounts of denial and panic. On the other hand, sitting around and drinking tequila is criminally irresponsible on the part of Amy, Eric and Stacy. But is it really any more fantastic than vampires, zombies, werewolves or Texas chainsaw massacres?

The Ruins (mansion)

In the end, the insidious nature of the vines became another major plus of the book for me. View all 47 comments. Aug 30, Aaron rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: Stephen King has a short story that I believe may have been entitled "The Raft" in which four college students head out to an old rock quarry. They swim out to a raft in the middle of the lake. As the afternoon progresses, they notice what appears to be a patch of oil skimming the surface of the water. One of the students dives into the lake for a post-coital swim and is mysteriously and grotesquely devoured by the oil patch, his skin pretty much being stripped right from its bones.

Now horrif Stephen King has a short story that I believe may have been entitled "The Raft" in which four college students head out to an old rock quarry. Now horrifed, the remaining students are now making an attempt to get to shore without being overtaken by the patch of oil. I was reminded of this story as I read this book. I was reminded of Stephen King in general as I read this book. It has Stephen King-like plotting and character development. It is praised by Stephen King in a back jacket critical blurb. The only real difference between this novel and the novels of Stephen King is that this book has a better ending.

Yeah, King pretty much sucks at those. Anyway, this novel concerns two American couples who take a summer trip to Cancun, sort of a last hurrah before school starts up again. While in Cancun, they become friends with a German man named Matthias who does speak English and a trio of Greek tourists who do not. Matthias announces that he is searching for his missing brother who headed into a Mayan archeological ruin with a hot archeologist he met on the beach.

The brother never returned. Collectively, the two couple, Matthias, and one of the Greeks decide that it might be fun to go check out the Mayan ruins. Everything, and I do mean everything , goes to hell from here. If you like horror novels, you should read this book. Well-paced, well-plotted, and just well-done overall, this is the best Stephen King novel that Stephen King never wrote.

View all 8 comments. Feb 10, Dan Schwent rated it really liked it Recommended to Dan by: This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. When four American college students and a German tourist go on a foray into the Mexican jungle, searching for the German's missing brother, they have no idea of the horror they will find themselves entangled in.

Will any of them leave the jungle alive? I was in the mood for some horror and received recommendations for this book from two highly regarded reviewers. I'm proud to say Kemper and Trudi weren't wrong. The Ruins is the story of five people who make a series of questionable choices and win When four American college students and a German tourist go on a foray into the Mexican jungle, searching for the German's missing brother, they have no idea of the horror they will find themselves entangled in.

The Ruins is the story of five people who make a series of questionable choices and wind up trapped on top of a hill with a killer vine terrorizing them. It reminded me of The Troop quite a bit in the way the relationships disintegrated as supplies ran low and the vine got more and more vicious. After one stupid mistake, things quickly fell apart. I'm surprised the characters lasted as long as they did. This book seems to have a polarising effect among reviewers.

Part of it is probably that it straddles the line between horror and thriller, stymying people who like to be able to slap a convenient label on things. The other part is probably the characters. I didn't find any of them overly likeable but I didn't hate any of them either. Sure, I wanted to slap them around from the moment they decided it was a good idea to go for a romp in the Mexican jungle all the way until the end but that's how horror stories of this type go sometimes.

Eric's self-mutilation was one of the creepier parts of the book, made creepier at the end when it turned out he actually had vines inside him. I felt bad for Jeff, trying to hold things together when everyone else seemed continually on the verge of losing his or her shit. I think I would have pushed some assholes down the mineshaft when he came back to find them all drunk.

The vine was creepy but that wasn't a surprise since plants are emotionless monsters. Just look at the Venus Flytrap or watch how quickly plants overtake an abandoned shed or cabin. I didn't have a problem with the plant's intelligence but I will admit that its mimicry was a little far fetched at the end. While The Ruins isn't your grandma's horror novel, it delivers the goods if you're looking for a tale of desperation and creepiness. Four out of five stars.

View all 73 comments. Oct 03, Matt rated it it was amazing Shelves: Did this [book or movie] scare me? Mostly, the answer is no. That I was grading horror on the wrong scale. At least not in the BOO! It should also horrify you. Yes, I recognize this should be self-evident, that legions of youngsters flocking to Eli Roth's torture-porn oeuvre knew this intuitively. What can I say? I'm old, and I'm starting to recognize all the things I don't get. Anyway, The Ruins isn't frightening, but it is horrific.

Almost from the start it filled me with dread, creating a weird tension as I longed to read on and hesitated to read on. The setup is rather standard. Young people, ostensibly good looking, find themselves in a wee bit of trouble. Things get bad before they get worse. Jeff and Amy are med students.

Eric and Stacy are not med students. Stacy and Amy are friends. All four are enjoying some time on the beach, getting drunk and lolling in the sun. They meet Mathias, a German tourist who is looking for his brother. They also meet some Greeks, one of whom they nickname Pablo. Mathias suggests they go meet his brother at some Mayan ruins. He has a crude map and a general notion about what they might find. For some reason, Jeff, Amy, Eric, Stacy, and the functional alcoholic, non-English speaking Pablo all find this a good idea.

It does not, in fact, turn out to be a good idea. The six get stranded on the ruins for reasons that I will not explain further, at the risk of spoiling plot points. Smith is like the Salinger of the modern suspense novel scene. He has written two books. This is the second, A Simple Plan was the first.

Both were made into movies.


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One of those movies had Billy Bob Thornton in it. That movie is not the one based on The Ruins , because there is no place for Billy Bob Thornton among young, attractive vacationers getting themselves into a situation. Unless, I suppose, Billy Bob is the situation. A Simple Plan came out in The Ruins followed at the speed of George R. This is a shame. Because Smith does quality work. The writing is superb. Smith knows how to modulate his prose so that it is at times evocative, at times descriptive, and at other times unobtrusive, as the story barrels forward.

At the start, the characters sort of blend together. But that changes as Smith draws them in firm, bold strokes, revealing personalities and back stories in an effectively poignant way. I cared for these stranded people. Well, maybe not Pablo. This is a battle for survival.

The characters are put through a desperate wringer that lasts pages in my trade paperback edition. Smith grounds things so well in reality that I readily accepted the gradual ratcheting of the horror elements. There are passages in The Ruins that are among the most brutal and graphic things I have ever read. And I say this as a person who makes it a point on occasion to discover what is out there in the world of brutal and graphic. Yet the gruesomeness is not gratuitous. It perfectly complements the tale that Smith has set out to tell.

When the heat of summer starts to break, when I walk down the grocery aisle and say to myself, I should get some soup , when the leaves overhead turn orange and yellow and red, and fall to the sidewalk where they brown and crumble underfoot, and when the beer I drink comes spiced in pumpkin, that is my window for reading horror.

I also recognize that horror, like religion and politics, creates wildly divergent reactions in people. If you look at the Amazon reviews, there are as many 1 star ratings as 5 star ratings. I can understand that. He excels at scene-setting, characterizations, dialogue, and creating tension. In my humble opinion — again, the opinion of a man who reads two or three horror novels a year, at best — this is a classic.

But it comes close. This is a novel that got inside me, insidiously. It is vivid and horrifying and ultimately unforgettable. View all 15 comments. Mar 08, Campbell rated it did not like it Recommends it for: Wow, what a disappointment. I'd been so excited about this-- I'm not a horror novel fan, but this had gotten such great reviews, I figured I'd give it a try.

The trailer for the movie also looked intriguing. Unfortunately, you may as well just watch the trailer and read the first forty pages of the book, because beyond that, it doesn't deliver. My first issue with the book was the characters-- they're the most one dimensional people I've come across in long time. Goldilocks had more personality Wow, what a disappointment. Goldilocks had more personality. It's hard to feel a whole lot of sympathy or empathy for characters who are nothing more than stock types-- "the ditzy sexy girl"; " the boy scout" etc.

Smith acknowledges their single dimensions midway through the book when the characters are talking about a film version of their situation and one of the character breaks them all down into types "the boy scout" "the prissy girl" "the slut" "the funny guy". Too bad Smith never makes the effort to flesh the characters out. It's hard to get too worked up about their deaths when you don't feel like there's anything at stake. The second problem and a far bigger one, in my opinion , is the lack of pay off.

Early in the book, the characters end up stranded on a mountain, kept captive by a Mayan village who forces them to stay on the mountain with this monster plant. Yeah, yeah, the plant's terrible, it's carnivorous and smart and is able to torture and kill it's captives. Once I got to the point in the book where it's clear the characters are stuck on the mountain, I thought, "I sure hope the next pages aren't spent just detailing how these people die.

I sure hope we solve the mystery of where the plant came from, why the Mayans are in collusion with it, and if it's truly a plant at all or an extension of something much more ominous below the surface. None of those things are answered and it is, in fact, pages of describing each of their demise. Part of the problem stems from Smith's tactic of only writing from the point of view of the American characters. If the characters were interesting, it might be worthwhile to see how they handle this awful and confusing situation, but we've already addressed that these folks are pretty dull.

I think a more interesting approach would've been to either tell part of the story from the Mayan's point of view or from an omniscient POV, detailing the history of why such a malevolent force is at work in this spot. Around that time, I happened to see a horror movie, and I thought that it might be fun to attempt something in that genre. This impulse came together with the ailing archaeologists, and The Ruins emerged from it.

The story has a very strong sense of place—the sticky, unbearable heat of the jungle rises up off the page and acts as a seventh character. I wonder if you could talk about this. I know that I often experience intense mood shifts when I travel to new locations, and I do feel an impulse to attribute these shifts to the places themselves, as if there were some attendant spirits that one can somehow sense upon arrival. I wanted a setting that was isolated enough for my characters to be trapped there with little hope of rescue, yet close enough to a tourist destination for them to stumble into their predicament without too much difficulty.

Did you visit the Mayan ruins where the story takes place? My research consisted of Internet surfing and tour book browsing, and I have no doubt that this has resulted in countless errors. The bulk of the novel takes place on a single hillside in the jungle, though, and this is a place that exists only in my imagination. When you sit down to write a story, do you know the basic outline of the story to begin with or do you let the narrative surprise you as you go along?

It depends on the story.

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With A Simple Plan I had a very, very detailed outline. With The Ruins it was much more limited—a loose sketch. This was true even for some of the more significant events in the book. As in A Simple Plan , these characters seem to make one fatal choice after another. What are your thoughts on fate versus choice? I do believe in a degree of free will, in the sense that choices are constantly being presented to us. But I think that as these choices accrue they start to have a determining effect. Our options are gradually narrowed until it can begin to feel as if we were in the grip of destiny or fate.

I think that choices often have future moments embedded within them—hidden or masked from us—and that these are only revealed in hindsight. And I suppose all this is very much part of what I find intriguing in the act of storytelling, whether as a writer or a reader. I like to watch characters as they make seemingly innocuous decisions, which then, with apparent inevitability, lead them into the most dire of situations. The Ruins seems to be as much about the psychological tension between the characters as it is about the ensuing action around them. Readers will attempt to identify with one of the characters, questioning what they would do in the situation.

Did you identify with one character in particular?

Yes, very much so. There are four main characters, and the book continually switches through their points of view as it progresses. Oddly, when I did a word count at the end, I found that Stacy had the least space dedicated to her, while Jeff had the most. Without giving too much away, plants—especially green vines with tendrils—assume enemy proportions in this tale.