Ruin Me is the best meta horror since Cabin in the Woods

The danger with meta horror is that any genuine scares are suffocated with a deluge of nods and winks. The movie can end up looking just a bit too self-satisfied by its discovery that the horror genre is kind of silly and full of clichés. Yes, we have noticed.

Films like Scream and Friday the 13th: Jason Lives are outrageously entertaining, but nobody can accuse them of being that scary. You're meant to view everything from an ironic distance and actively enjoy the characters' gruesome deaths.

Even Cabin in the Woods, Drew Goddard's mega-ambitious meta horror, isn't that scary. It's very clever and it tries to explore why we love horror so much rather than just poking fun at the genre, but you're unlikely to be screaming in fright.

The Cabin in the Woods aka the more successful Evil Dead reboot

Ruin Me, Preston DeFrancis's debut film which premiered at the 2017 Screamfest and has recently come to Shudder, may have upped the meta horror ante.

It follows a bunch of horror super fans as they attend Slasher Sleepout, an immersive horror experience / escape room where punters get to live through a slasher film. When it seems like some of their number are actually dying, what started out as McKamey Manor in the woods becomes an actual fight for survival.

The twisty premise is as follows: are we watching actors in a slasher film pretending to be people pretending to be in a slasher film, or actors pretending to be people pretending to be in a slasher film who are actually in a slasher film with actual killers. Yikes!

Yes, there are tropes and references galore

Does it poke fun at horror cliches? The participants are handed flashlights remotely controlled so that they go on the blink whenever something scary happens. One of the unhappy campers casually strips of in front of the others by the campfire, a nod to slasher films' love affair with gratuitous nudity. 

At one point the protagonist Alex (Marcienne Dwyer) asks "You guys here that?", to which dicky horror nerd Pitch (John Odom) replies "Seriously?" Yep, this film is tropey as hell and is having a whale of a time with it. Watch out for Alex's discovery of the first body – it matches Jason Lives in terms of black comedy.

Does it reference other horror films? The setting obviously aludes to Blair Witch and Friday the 13th. There are moments which reference Saw and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The killers' scarecrow style mask takes visual cues from The Strangers, as well as inumerable other films where psychopathic serial killers don blank white masks.

At the beginning, Alex is treated to a series of uninventive Carrie jokes for packing tampons. Although Alex is very much not into the horror genre (her boyfriend dragged her along), even she's dropping Jason Voorhees references by the end.

It's actually scary

This is very much a film for people who have seen a lot of horror films. But while Cabin in the Woods cannibalised everything from The Evil Dead to Hellraiser, the allusions were just one more way of keeping viewers at an ironic distance from the action.

In Ruin Me, it's the horror obsessive characters who are dropping the references, and not a slightly smug film director. Constant references to other movies can drag us out of the film and make us feel like we're constantly being reminded that we're watching a horror movie. 

Because the genre knowledge is organically incorporated into the plot by having horror super fans as the characters (Scream did this too, to be fair), it doesn't feel so jarring. DeFrancis still has the liberty to make clever jokes, but when things start going tits up, you feel a genuine sense of panic rather than idly wondering what film the director is referencing this time.

Rather than constantly reminding us that it's a film, hence artificial and not to be taken seriously, tension is created in Ruin Me by making the audience question exactly how artificial the experience is.

Are the characters actually being picked off one by one, or is this just a really intense horror experience? Some may ask why the characters would put themselves through Slasher Sleepout, but aren't we, the viewers, trying to trick ourselves into being scared too?

What difference does it make to us if the action onscreen is real or staged for the characters? In order to enjoy a horror film, do we have to convince ourselves that it's "real"?

Throw in a generous portion of narrative left turns, and we're left feeling genuine uncertainty like the characters. What started out as a game of "spot the reference" is quickly overshadowed by the question at the heart of the film: are people actually dying on Slasher Sleepout, and if so why?

It explores why horror is so enduring

While Cabin in the Woods succeeded in making the viewer feel complicit in their enjoyment of the teens being butchered, it's grandiose reasoning for horror's success – that viewers enjoy watching twenty-somethings being punished for their youth and beauty – didn't ring quite true. Ruin Me has a much more convincing explanation for why people like us are horror fanatics.

When Alex admits that she's not all that in to horror and her favourite movie is actually Dirty Dancing, Pitch strangely takes this very personally. "The shit that we watch, it's twisted yeah, but everyone knows it's completely fake. Movies like [Dirty Dancing] – those are insidious."

Of course there's a level of dramatic irony here, as just how "fake" the Slasher Sleepout experience is will soon be called into question. But Pitch's speech is also a fascinating view on why horror is so enjoyable. 

Though on some levels we convice ourselves that the movie is "real" so we can be scared alongside the characters, on some level we also know that it's "fake". Hence why the characters in Ruin Me are loving life when they're scared because they're pretending to be in a slasher experience, and are less keen when they're scared because there's an actual danger of them being killed.

Ruin Me imagines the horror genre as a cathartic way of feeling fear in a controlled environment. The movie is all about the thin line between this controlled fear and how the characters react when that safe environment breaks down.

It's the equivalent of Sadako crawling out of your TV screen in Ringu, making what looked like a passive experience of fear a genuine threat.

Better to watch a horror than a romcom

WARNING: SPOILERS 

Pitch's snobbery about romcoms may seem like a throwaway comment, but it's actually integral to the movie's themes. In a twist that you're likely to see coming, the real villain is actually Alex's boyfriend Nathan (Matt Dellapina), who wants to punish Alex for being unfaithful. He straight out murders her ex at the movie's climax.

Here's the clever bit: Nathan's motivations are directly influenced by romcom tropes. He's the archetypal "nice guy" – the protagonist who wins the girl by persistence and continued displays of affection.

The Nice Guy, as defined by Urban Dictionary

Nathan has supported Alex since she got out of rehab and has given her some sense of stability, so he can't understand why she'd want to go back to her destructive ex who got her into this mess in the first place.

Nathan has bought into the "doing nice things = sex" trope present in any number of romcoms. He, unlike the horror fans, has mistaken movies for reality. Pitch is right, romcoms are insidious. By convincing us that they are an accurate reflection of the world, they inspire toxic behaviour.

Some film fans are very likely to walk away from Love Actually thinking that if you're a nice guy who does nice things then you deserve romantic fulfillment. You're less likely to watch Friday the 13th and think, "You know what, massacring teens actually looks really enjoyable."

So Ruin Me, as well as being packed with easter eggs and knowing winks, manages to be a properly scary, visceral horror experience too and make a case for why horror is valuable as a genre. We think it's one of the most exciting new horror films currently available to stream.

The important bit

Where can I watch the Ruin Me trailer?

Where can I stream Ruin Me?

Ruin Me is available to stream on Shudder now.

If slashers are your thing, why not check out our gallery of the best faces actors pulled in the Friday the 13th movies when they fell prey to Jason.

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