The BLONDE ALWAYS DIES

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

I was watching a TV rerun of the movie The Ruins the other day, and, although I had seen the movie before, I experienced the same disappointment.  

I wondered why a brooding, intense terror tale such as this could become such a run-of-the-mill teen slasher/killer flick (substitute the prescient jungle vines for Freddy Krueger and you got Nightmare on Jungle Circle).  

If you never read Scott Smith, please do yourself a favor and pick up a copy (any used book store should carry him) of either The Ruins or his other, earlier masterpiece, A Simple Plan. 

Despite their nihilistic finales (and be warned: you feel totally hopeless for the protagonists at the end of each), they are riveting page-turning suspense classics (Plan is more tautly realistic, but get and read them both).   

Unhappily, Smith is the closest thing suspense/genre fiction has to Harper Lee in output (to be fair, he’s written two books to her one), but fans are quivering with hope that he’s got a third in the hopper.

Back to the movie.   Why was it so ordinary, so much the same as every other “teens dying in the face of an implacable menace” suspense thriller?   These poor kids—they faced Freddy, Jason, Death (in the Final Destination series) and mechanized Rube Goldberg traps (in both FD and the relentless Saw series).  

After a while, it’s all the same—death has the same face (usually Tobin Bell's or Tony Todd's, both sly and implacable and always playing games). 

Then I realized what happened.  I realized what had turned the second cinematic foray into Smith’s limited oeuvre into teen/blood fodder. 

Hair color.  

As almost anyone who’s a regular reader of literature knows, there is no genre that suffers more in transition to the screen than horror/fantasy/sci-fi.   

Numerous Harry Potter fans saw those character-filled, plot-filled beauties by J.K. Rowling get scissored down for the movies (they never did do Peeves the Poltergeist); Tolkien’s Ring trilogy, despite Peter Jackson’s brilliant films, is unrecognizable (fans of the books, while fascinated, were still disappointed—no Scouring of the Shire?).   

And Lovecraft?  Only Re-Animator has come close to doing that Miskatonic misogynist justice (although the Alien is mighty close to a Lovecraftian beastie). 

The transition problem has to do with visualization, but it's the visualization of something the imagination has already seen.  

When I read a book, I picture the protagonists, alive, individual and characterized by how they think and act as well as the way they look.  In the movies, all you’ve got is the looks, since there’s little time for anything else; we’ve got a story to get on with and only 100 minutes for it. 

I saw the blonde girl of the doomed party; I saw the brunette.  I knew the blonde would die in the ruins; I knew the brunette wouldn’t (Spoiler alert?  For whom?).   Sadly, that defined the entire film in a glance (and that wasn’t even how the book ended). 

I thought all the way back to House of Wax—the original Vincent Price 3-D number, which I saw in a revival house in San Francisco in the late 90s.  Carolyn Jones, whom I will forever remember as raven-dark Morticia Addams in the TV series, was wearing a blonde wig.  I knew she was going to die.  

In the remake, blonde Paris Hilton dies early (the audience loved it); Elisha Cuthbert does not (she is an actual blonde, but in the movie she was a light brunette).  

And in the case of Alison Lohman in Drag Me to Hell, well, she’s a stunning blonde, so I knew she was going to Hell before the opening credits ended.   

That's why a promising story like Smith's got shuttled into video limbo.  All we know for sure is the blonde will die.  

Also, if there's an African-American in the cast he will die first.  

But that's another post.