INTERVIEW WITH A FILMMAKER: Director Preston DeFrancis Talks ‘Ruin Me’, Extreme Escape Rooms, and the Slasher Resurgence
Ruin Me follows Alexandra, partner to a horror-obsessive boyfriend, who finds herself cajoled into attending a live-action horror experience. The terror of being trapped alone with a gaggle of slasher nuts for the weekend soon pales into insignificance as some very real horrors begin to unfold around her. From then on out, Ruin Me is a hugely enjoyable outing that delivers shocks and scares while keeping its audience firmly on their toes with some cunning twists.
The Squid sat down with director Preston DeFrancis to talk wild stabs in the dark, live-action horror and the rise of the smart slasher.
Tom: Ruin Me is your first feature film – how did you find the transition from short films to a feature-length production, and what lessons had you learned from your earlier work that you were able to employ?
Preston: A great question, and not the easiest to answer because it was a long and winding road from shorts to feature. I went to grad film school at the University of Southern California, and had made many short films as part of that program. My graduate thesis film, The Big Production, was successful for a short film – it won some awards, it had some decent festival play – and yet, it honestly didn’t open any doors to professional directing opportunities. (It’s now available for free on Amazon Streaming, by the way. It’s not a horror film, though!)
So my screenwriting partner, Trysta Bissett, and I started writing feature scripts. We had some success getting those read by industry folks, but nothing came close to getting made. Meanwhile, we were both toiling away in low-level jobs that weren’t bringing us any artistic fulfilment. When we had the idea for Ruin Me, we knew it was something that we could make ourselves. We knew we had to do it for a micro-budget. So we tailored it to locations we knew that we had at our disposal, and wrote to our strengths and the strengths of our talented friends who we knew we could con into working for less than their normal rate.
In terms of what I learned from making shorts: Put storytelling first and foremost above everything else, most importantly your own ego. The only entity that gets the diva treatment in a movie that I make is the story itself. What that means is that every person – from the actors, to each member of the crew – has to be a partner in telling the story. On set, be honest with yourself when a story point isn’t coming across, and do what you can to fix it in the moment. And then, in Post, do test screenings and be open to what people tell you isn’t clear or isn’t working.
T: We understand that the idea for Ruin Me sprang from interactive horror experiences that you attended. What role did these experiences play in the writing and shooting of Ruin Me?
P: Trysta and I, along with our creative producer, Aaron Galligan-Stierle, had a great time attending both extreme haunts and escape rooms to help us research this project. I can honestly say we never attended a bad one! The people responsible for these are such talented, creative folks. What we did come away with, though, was the fact that we were never actually scared at one of these. So we started to imagine what it would take to really freak us out. And that’s how the idea for Ruin Me was born.
Ruin Me’s fictional extreme haunt, Slasher Sleepout, is very much its own thing, not quite like any single one that exists (at least that we know of!) But we knew we wanted to bring in the puzzle-solving aspect. We also knew we wanted to dramatise the experience you have when in an escape room, which is constantly asking yourself – “Is this part of the game or not?” If you’ve ever done one of these things, you find yourself questioning every item in the room, trying to figure out if it’s something you should use or not. For instance, I remember one escape room in which I was convinced a little box on the wall must have held the key to the solution, and I started monkeying with it, and the organisers were like, “Don’t touch that, that’s the air conditioning control!”
T: Why do you think we’re seeing a resurgence of interest in slasher films at the moment, and particularly in films that, like yours, play with the tropes and expectations of the genre?
P: The structure of the slasher film is such a powerful paradigm. It speaks to us on a primal level – the fear that our friends and loved ones will be taken away from us, and we will be left alone to defend ourselves against a powerful evil. That structure, I think, will always be around. At the same time, that paradigm has been used quite a lot in horror films, so I think that filmmakers like me enjoy taking what has gone before, acknowledging it, and then trying to turn it on its head.
Doing that can be a lot of fun for us who grew up watching these, and I think that’s one reason we are seeing a lot of “meta” slashers right now – the 80s VHS kids are now adults and getting to put our own stamp on what we loved when we were young.
It’s an interesting challenge to do slasher film these days, especially in terms of how meta you get it with it, because you are kinda damned if you do and damned if you don’t. By that I mean that if you just go completely straight with it, the audience may be like, “Oh, we’ve seen that before.” And if you get meta with it, the audience may be like, “Come on, just give us a basic slasher!”
For us with Ruin Me, we really wanted to ultimately make it about one character’s journey. So that was our guiding light.
T: Ruin Me is a film that keeps the audience permanently off balance. Can you describe the significance of keeping the viewer guessing?
We tried to be hyper-aware that audiences are smart and have seen a lot of movies before our movie. So they are going to be trying to guess from moment one what the answer to this puzzle is. So we tried to plant moments throughout the movie that would lead the viewer down a certain path, thinking they have it all figured out; and then pull that rug out from under them; then lead them down a different path, only to pull that rug, too.
It’s a tough balance, because then we hope that the ultimate solution is both surprising and emotionally satisfying, given everything that has come before.
T: The film sticks to a single perspective throughout, making Marcienne Dwyer’s lead role very challenging, can you explain the reasoning behind this decision?
P: Maintaining that single perspective was an artistic guide for us. It helped inform everything, from where the camera would be placed to what a music cue would sound like. Our goal was to put the audience in the shoes of Marcienne, who plays Alexandra, our heroine. She has no idea what is going on, things may or may not be really happening, so we wanted to firmly give the audience that same experience.
That’s also another way that our film is unique in relation to many other films in this genre. Grounding the film so firmly in a single character’s perspective is not something that a lot of other slasher films do, and honestly excited us artistically more than anything else about this project.
The hardest thing for Marcienne, at least from my perspective, was that she was in EVERY DAMN SCENE of the movie! That meant she was the first actor on set every day, and the last one to leave every day. She never had an “easy” day where she could just come in and coast, or where she could go enjoy swimming in Lake Michigan with other cast members who weren’t called. She had to bring it every single day – and she did!
T: So what are your future filmmaking plans, and do you have any upcoming projects?
P: My day job is working as part of the writing team for television shows. I was an associate producer on Manhunt: Unabomber, which aired on the Discovery Channel in August and is now available on Netflix streaming. In terms of this team’s next film, we are working on a script called After The Summer, about a 21-year-old college student who gets interested in a murder in the small town in which her family has a summer home, and decides to lie to her parents and skip her senior year of college to investigate. Her sleuthing puts her in great danger from… well, I can’t tell you any more than that…
A huge thank you to Preston DeFrancis for talking with us!
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