Scare Me and Werewolves Within director Josh Ruben is carving up his place in the slasher pantheon with Heart Eyes, a charming rom-com with a gnarly body count. Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding star as co-workers mistaken for a couple, putting them directly in the crosshairs of a vicious killer on Valentine’s Day. The slasher, […]
Scare Me and Werewolves Within director Josh Ruben is carving up his place in the slasher pantheon with Heart Eyes, a charming rom-com with a gnarly body count.
Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding star as co-workers mistaken for a couple, putting them directly in the crosshairs of a vicious killer on Valentine’s Day. The slasher, out in theaters this Friday, wears its romantic comedy influences on its sleeves, but one key slasher guided Ruben on his first slasher film.
“My gold standard, my north star, was Tommy McLoughlin’s Jason Lives,” Ruben tells Bloody Disgusting of the film’s influences. “That film is as brutal as it is silly as it is fun, and that was the white whale. Then everything after that was searching within myself, the kid that loved rom-coms, like Sleepless in Seattle, which is as funny and sweet as it is heartbreaking, super well acted but also silly, etc. Also, movies like Defending Your Life and Bigand so on and so forth.”
Director Josh Ruben (center), Jordana Brewster as Detective Jeanine and Mason Gooding as Jay on the set of Screen Gems and Spyglass Media Group’s HEART EYES. Photo by: Christopher Moss
Striking the right tone between romantic comedy and horror isn’t the easiest needle to thread, but Ruben’s trick to finding that perfect balance starts with his cast. The director didn’t want knowing winks in any of his actors’ performances.
Ruben says, “You always start with actors who ideally have chemistry, and it blooms from there. The icing on the cake is the funny boss (Michaela Watkins) or Gigi Zumbado as Olivia’s friend in the film, doing their thing, being as big as they would be in this film if it were just a rom-com. But then you just make sure that the actors play terror for real, and they don’t get caught trying to be funny. That is my MO for everything that I make because if your actors are playing it with a wink, you’re dead. You can’t do what I want to do tonally.”
The filmmaker also looked to a pair of horror masters for tone. “I look at Joe Dante’s work as, even some of John Carpenter’s stuff, but I think Joe Dante specifically is someone who can get away with. Look at Phoebe Cates’ monologue in Gremlins, but also, Mom just smashed the shit out of a gremlin with a pot, a pan, and a knife. It all works because everybody is so genuine, it’s so heartfelt, and then the icing on the cake is the filmmaking stuff. That was how it all came together. And then, of course, with music, sound design, composer Jay Wadley, it was the same thing. Let’s not get caught trying to be funny. Let’s just do an Alan Silvestri suite that you’d hear in Father of the Bride and then have it ratchet to Christopher Young.”
The Heart Eyes killer from Screen Gems and Spyglass Media Group’s HEART EYES. photo by: Christopher Moss
Finding the tone is one thing, but a slasher lives and dies by its killer. Once the killer’s look and mask design were in place, the next step was ensuring the Heart Eyes killer had a personality to match.
“I wanted to see what our stunt performer, Alex McCall, he’s phenomenal, brought to it without instructing Alex to do anything specifically,” Ruben explains. “I did tell him he had to watch Jason Lives. I wanted to start there and say, ‘Alex, just watch Jason Lives, and let me just see what you do.’ Then I would tweak it. I wanted to get the head cock because they always do the head cock, you know, and that just feels super iconic to me. I always pictured Nick Castle, or really any moment in H20 where you get to see Michael do his famous move. But the most original you can make it is allowing an individual to come in and put their stamp on it.Then I shape that if I need to.
“The only thing I would instruct Alex to do was sharpen certain movements or keep sensuality in mind because Heart Eyes is kind of an erotic character, in a way. We talked a little bit about Pinhead, etc. But I needed them to bring their own originality to it, and then, from then on, anything that bumped me as the director, ‘No, that’s too much, or it’s too little, or it’s not enough.’ There’s very little you have to do in a mask like that to be effective.”
Of course, getting to helm a slasher let Ruben, a massive horror fan, tackle a slasher must: the kills. He admits, “I wish I could have added a few more. I really wanted to homage to the pickaxe going through the face and eyeball from My Bloody Valentine because it’s so brilliant. But I don’t know if it would have done much for me or for the audience. We’ve seen that before. What else can you do? I try to, as a genre fan, lean into specifics because those are what make the memorable kills.”
Ruben put a lot of thought into the kills, making sure they were fresh and original. “There’s the very first kill of the movie; I absolutely love it because it’s so specific. I’m a huge horror fan, and I love interesting, fun kills,” he explains. “Specifics are your best friend. That was everything I wanted to bring to it. The quote, unquote, ‘famous van kill’ was just a meditation I had. I thought, ‘No one did the Michael Bay Texas Chainsaw thing for a while, maybe we should just homage that. But without it being a gunshot, maybe there’s a tire iron angle to it.’ They were very much in the script. But any great action sequence written out in a screenplay the director is given, it wasn’t micromanaged or super spelled out.It had a lot of freedom to kind of meditate on, ‘What else can I do? How specific can we get about where the puncture is and how I shoot it?’ That’s so fun and invaluable because we’ve seen everything. You’ve seen everything. So it’s like, ‘What else can we do?'”
Heart Eyes takes place over one intense evening, and luckily, you can see in the dark.This is a night slasher with stunning clarity. That was part of Ruben’s intent. “I wanted blue moonlight from the beginning. I’m a huge blue moonlight fan. I love my Joe Dante. I love Jaws, I love Get Out. And I also love anything Steven Spielberg that used to freak me out. I wanted to bring blue moonlight into the fray because rom-coms of yesteryear also had blue moonlight that usually came in through raked blinds.
“You look at Jason Lives, and there’s the same lighting/gaffing effect, shaping the room so blue moonlight was where we started. Then you bring in the colors of a Valentine’s Day movie to make it feel like you’re watching a rom-com that then gets, you know, Wes Craven.”
Heart Eyes releases in theaters on February 7, 2025.
