Just as director Smith insisted that the `The Ruins' would benefit from being shot on a practical location rather than a soundstage, so too did he favor prosthetics over CGI animation for the film's more graphic scenes. The reason he explains is that, “a majority of the gruesome moments in this movie happen outdoors in broad daylight. Everything is exposed, and unlike traditional horror movies, that means you can't trick things as much by using shadow and light. If we'd just relied on animation, it would have felt distant, and this film is truly all about the audience viscerally connecting with what's happening onscreen.”
That task was handed to special effects prosthetics designer Jason Baird, who called “The Ruins” a dream come true: “It was so much fun! There were so many cool make-up effects.” For Baird, there were three key moments in the film. One involved a woman with vines running through her body, while another dealt with Stacy's insanely desperate attempt to remove the vines from her body by cutting into her own flesh with a knife. But of all these moments, the biggest challenge involved Mathias, who breaks his legs in a fall and then wakes up to discover that the vines have eaten away much of his flesh from his knees down.
“It's just ragged meat and bones,” Baird says. “The legs end up being amputated with a rock, and all the excess flesh is hacked at and cut away with a small knife, and blood jets everywhere. So we had to produce a realistic puppet from the legs down.”
“The prosthetics were extraordinary,” says Anderson, who spent hours sitting in a hole while attached to a fake lower body. “They were made from molds of my stomach and legs, so I'd look down and see these bizarre limbs that were the right length, had the right color hairs, the right skin, everything.” This helped with Anderson's performance, because unlike having his body covered in a tinted body stocking and then digitally replaced in post-production, he could physically see himself being abused right before his own eyes. “I actually got `phantom limb syndrome,' where I would be looking at my prosthetic foot and really trying to move it,” he says. “So you know that if it's affecting me that way then I'm going to do good work.”
Malone says she'll probably have nightmares about the prosthetics for the rest of her life: “Particularly the scene where Mathias has his legs amputated. This gelatinous bone material was pumping out so much blood and it smelled terrible! I knew in my head it was all fake but I started to get a little nauseous, and for an actor in the middle of a scene that's a luxury. It really was amazing to work with such incredible prosthetics people.”
Ten sets of legs, primarily made of silicone, were used to achieve this one effect. But what surprised Baird was that the dirtier and bloodier the legs became from usage, the better and more realistic they looked. “We did a lot of research and autopsy reference,” he says. “We got real lumps of raw meat and watched how it moved and sagged and hit the ground. Then we mixed and matched various chemicals, silicones and foams until they mimicked the real thing.”
Comments executive producer Trish Hofmann: “You can tell how much Jason loves his job. When he first came to show us the legs on set, they were hidden in his trunk-two bloody stumps in the back of his car. We were definitely impressed by how they looked - and sincerely hoped he wouldn't get pulled over by the police.”
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