“We floored it in both genres”: director Josh Ruben on romantic comedy slasher ‘Heart Eyes’
The romantic comedy and the slasher are two genres that typically exist at opposite ends of the cinematic spectrum, except nobody seemed to tell director Josh Ruben, who plants one foot firmly in both worlds with his latest feature, Heart Eyes.
Olivia Holt’s Ally and Mason Gooding’s Jay immediately hit it off following their initial meet-cute, the sort of setup familiar from a thousand rom-coms. However, after catching the attention of the ‘Heart Eyes Killer’, a sadistic serial murderer who makes it their mission to transform happy couples into bloody mush every Valentine’s Day, the unfortunate case of mistaken identity plunges them into a fight for their lives.
It’s been a quick turnaround for the movie all things considered, with Heart Eyes first being publicly announced in June 2024. Less than eight months later, the combination of star-crossed romance and blood-soaked slasher will land in cinemas on February 7th, and Ruben prefers a tighter schedule.
“I like to work fast,” he said. “People were freaking out about the time crunch. I pitched to get this gig; I pitched on the job on February 14th, Valentine’s Day 2024, and now it’s coming out a week shy of Valentine’s Day 2025. I’m an independent filmmaker. I know how to move fast. I liked to move fast. I think everybody else was kind of anxious about the date because there’s so much that goes on behind the scenes.”
Heart Eyes marks Ruben’s third feature as a director after the horror comedy thriller Scare Me and the video game adaptation Werewolves Within. However, this is the first one of the filmmaker’s movies to get an exclusive wide theatrical release. At the end of the day, though, the goal remains the same: get as many people to see it as possible.
“I think that the advantage we have is it’s technically a holiday film,” he offered of Heart Eyes‘ Valentine’s Day trappings. “Even if the masses don’t go on this very day, maybe there’ll be the kind of thing that happens – not that it’ll be completely lambasted the moment it comes out – but that it’ll grow into something where it becomes the holiday routine every year to watch alongside the other greats. Ideally, 1981’s My Bloody Valentine.”
On the surface, Heart Eyes might seem like a straightforward film, but it’s a deceptively complex one. It’s a full-blown rom-com with all the trimmings, but it’s also a full-blown slasher with all of those trimmings, too. For Ruben, looking inward was the easiest way for him to thread that delicate tonal needle.
“Honestly, it was getting in touch with the part of myself that loves rom-coms as much as he loves horrors,” he explained. “I almost had to search for that and realise or find the revelation that I used to be exposed to movies like Big, Pretty Woman, and Defending Your Life, all of which I consider to be rom-coms in their own right, just as much as I was exposed to, like, Jason and Freddy.”
“It was exciting once I sort of realised, like, ‘No, wait, little Josh equally loved Nora Ephron as much as he loved Tom McLoughlin’s Jason Lives. Then I started to get excited about the successful, hopefully, successful blending of these tones.” As Ruben alluded to, Heart Eyes exists somewhere between Nancy Meyers’ A Nightmare on Elm Street and Nora Ephron’s Friday the 13th, which realistically shouldn’t work.
And yet, because the filmmaker commits so wholeheartedly to both of those disparate genres, it does. “The secret is to care about the characters; your characters have to play the rom-com stuff as genuinely as the horror stuff,” he offered. “So, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan doing exactly what they did in Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, but then playing scared as hell is going to work because you’re with them, and you’re endeared by them. I think Olivia and Mason did it so beautifully here, and that’s why we’re along for the ride.”
Ruben described the music, score, production design, and the rest of the elements as “the icing on the cake,” but Heart Eyes rests almost entirely on its two leads. Holt and Gooding effectively have to give two wildly different performances: they need to convince and have chemistry as the standard rom-com pairing without feeling out of place in the horror space, and vice versa.
Continuing, “Honestly, that’s a credit to my casting directors, Mary Vernieu and Bret Howe. I was constantly holding them over the fire for just getting me good human beings because I’m going halfway across the world. I like to work with good apples. Honestly, once I had met and had each of them read and had the kind of background check on each that they were both awesome, then it was like, ‘This is a no-brainer.'”
“They didn’t even do a chemistry read,” Ruben revealed. “I just knew it was going to work. Well, I didn’t know it was going to work, but I definitely gambled that it would work, and I’m glad that we gambled because it works.” The stars are required to deal with romance, comedy, blood, guts, and gore, often in the space of a single scene, a tonal tightrope that the director was constantly aware he was walking.
“It’s a combination of what it takes to choose. Brett Bachman, my editor, and I would pore over which takes would be the most genuine, which would be more comedic when required,” Ruben elaborated. “And it’s a big deal for Jay Wadley, our composer, as well. The music is so manipulative in these films, from Halloween to My Best Friend’s Wedding, and you have to treat it with equal Alan Silvestri care as you do with, like, Joe Bishara.”
“It’s every department working together and keeping an eye on everything,” with Ruben keeping his eye on one constant. “My North Star from the beginning, just as broad strokes for the whole cast and crew was, ‘Let’s treat this for real’. Let’s never wink and not make it a sketch comedy film. That was the version I didn’t want anything to do with, and here we are. It’s working so far.”
The filmmaker may have wanted to avoid winking at the audience, but Heart Eyes does just that. In addition to dealing with the titular killer, Ally and Jay are also in the crosshairs of two detectives named Hobbs and Shaw. In 99% of cases, it would be a throwaway gag, but in this instance, original Fast & Furious family member Jordana Brewster plays Hobbs opposite Devon Sawa’s Shaw.
“There was always some reservation about that on the studio side because, is that too crazy?” Ruben acknowledged. “But that was written before we got Jordana Brewster aboard. That was just, like, whoever we get, if it’s, whatever, Gerard Butler and Emma Stone, it’s always going to be there. Jordana was excited about this role, and I’d always wanted to work with Devon. I was like, ‘Well, first of all, you’ve got the most nostalgic genre pair right there’, and they’re both wonderful human beings, but it elevated it. We had to test it. We test-screened it: one of the biggest laughs in the movie. It just tickles me.”
Speaking of the cast and their relationship to horror, there’s plenty of it. Brewster appeared in The Faculty and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, Sawa played the lead in Final Destination and starred in all three seasons of the Chucky TV series, Mason is a fixture of the refreshed Scream franchise, and Holt was in Totally Killer. There’s some multi-generational metatextuality in play, something Ruben put down to a string of happy coincidences.
“Honestly, that’s just how it shook out,” he clarified. “You get your big list of folks from the studio, and I’m tempted to tell you some of the ridiculously gigantic swings. Just an example: Julia Roberts. They were like, ‘Oh, we should get Julia Roberts for this role’. Obviously, you know that’s not necessarily going to pan out, but ultimately, in your career, if you’re a successful actor, you’ve done one genre film.'”
Adding, “Mary Reilly is Julia Roberts. There she is. She’s done horror. She’s part of the horror tapestry for all you Mary Reilly fans out there. So I think ultimately, every actor is going to do a genre film. I mean, even Tom Cruise, despite how much we dig The Mummy, it just worked out that way. I don’t know that I get such a kick out of it that it’s beyond all else. Everybody is so relevant in the genre that it makes for an interesting tapestry, but it wasn’t planned. It just kind of fell into place that way, and people are getting a kick out of the texture.”
Heart Eyes ups the ante by being Ruben’s darkest and bloodiest film yet, but it’s also his most romantic by far. Was it always his mission statement to lean harder than ever into both sides of the equation, even if they’re as far away as genres can be? “Absolutely. Hard yes,” came the answer. “That will be the great success of the film. I think that’s what will make this thing have a long life, is that we took both seriously as hell. We floored it in both genres.”
When he’s not busy directing, Ruben is also an experienced actor with dozens of on-camera credits to his name. He played one of the two leads in Scare Me opposite Aya Cash and was completely absent from Werewolves Within. As it turned out, he made a point of placing himself in Heart Eyes, even if it completely passed this writer by.
“Well, actually. Um, actually, I appear in Heart Eyes as ‘Moviegoer #2’, and my famous line is, ‘Holy shit, someone call 911!’ at the movie theatre. So, spoiler alert: Josh is in it. Josh does appear. Josh trying to get that SAG cred. Yeah, it was totally my Hitchcock moment or my Spielberg at the convention in Gremlins, although it was a Joe Dante film.” More than just a background cameo, Ruben had another reason for making sure he was that patron.
“I mean, any opportunity to not just act alongside or in the vicinity of actors like this, but also to be in a studio movie, even just to have one line, that’s something ten-year-old me never possibly could have fathomed. I’d only ever gotten to extra work in movies, like my famous background role in the Christmas film Elf, but just to be shot by a cinematographer like Stephen Murphy or by our camera crew is like, ‘Oh, I’ve watched you guys exercise your genius’. Now I get the honour of being shot by you and starstruck on both sides of the camera.”
The Heart Eyes script was penned by Christopher Landon, Michael Kennedy, and Phillip Murphy, who between them have plenty of genre-bending experience through the likes of Happy Death Day, Freaky, It’s a Wonderful Knife, and The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard. That said, Ruben is no slouch in that department either, and he brought plenty of his own ideas to the table.
“I’ll give you the exclusive on this,” he teased. “One of the most famous monologues in the film towards the end involves Gigi Zumbado, Olivia Holt’s best friend Monica, and she encourages her to go after the love of her life by spouting a monologue of movie titles, and that was something I pictured in my mind for quite some time. I was like, ‘We just have to take the option.'”
“I slipped it to Gigi, and Gigi memorised it, unbeknownst to anyone else, really, in the entire crew, and we should have winked at each other,” Ruben recalled. “I was like, OK, now that we’ve gotten the script one, she’s like, ‘Do the other one?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, do the other one’. And she did it. Everybody was like, ‘Whoa, wait, what is this?'”
Ruben is well aware that “there are a lot of players in movies and moviemaking, a lot of producers, and a lot of stuff has to get approved,” but he was also willing to bet on himself and his cast. “We’re just going to get it. It’s going to be great. I know it’s going to work,” he said of his additions. “And it worked. She nailed it. That was one of a good number. That’s your job as a director when you come aboard, is to take a script and go, ‘OK, what’s the best version of this that I can bring to the table?'”
Along similar lines, it also applies to the titular antagonist. “Yeah, he’s a killer with heart-shaped eyes, but what if they lit up red? What if he had night vision? What if he had a whole utility belt of weapons?” Still, not every dream was realised. “I wanted him to have a big muscle car that had a bunch of ‘Batman from hell’ weapons on it, but maybe that’s for another day.”
Heart Eyes continues Ruben’s approach to putting fresh and inventive spins on well-worn genres, an approach that he knows how to handle. After briefly being dislodged from the summit by Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Werewolves Within is back on top as the single most critically acclaimed video game adaptation ever made, a badge of honour that’s created a sense of friendly competition.
“My buddy, Ben Schwartz, I have to text him,” he said of the ongoing battle. “I’m stoked because it’s a very, very tough thing to do, to be able to take an extraordinary IP, virtually unadaptable IP, and bring a beautiful story to it. I love that. I love that challenge. I love when that can be done. Especially in the horror genre, you can make something so deeply feeling and so terrifying. It reminds me of everything that Joe Dante and Steven Spielberg used to do when I was younger, from their work on Amazing Stories through The Howling. It’s like they were so deeply feeling, but they were all so extraordinary. And I’d love to keep making films with that DNA.”
To that end, Ruben appreciates the easiest way to bring out his best as a creative is to challenge expectations. “You have to keep yourself excited. The way to stay excited is to deconstruct and subvert, keep it fresh, not do too much of what’s been done before.” All three of his directorial efforts to date have traded on his background in comedy and added plenty of horror into the melting pot, but the filmmaker is always open to changing it up.
“I would love to do something that’s a little more deeply feeling. Almost like the kind of kids’ movies I used to see when I was younger,” he mused. “Where they really put kids in danger, where there was some kind of extraordinary circumstance where it was genre, but it was also super heartfelt. I’d be interested in that. I love musicals. I think that would probably be the most challenging possible thing. That’s another piece of what I loved as a kid, or a piece of me from my childhood that I really took to, were musicals. I used to see musicals, I was in musical theatre, even though I was a terrible singer and dancer. So I’d be interested in exploring that genre for sure.”
Ruben recently introduced action into the equation after helming all seven episodes in the third season of Kevin Hart’s Die Hart, and there’s definitely a gap in the market for the Heart Eyes version of the action genre, which is one part Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot ’em up and another part horror.
“Oh man, I would love to make anything with a horror hero,” he enthusiastically replied. “We’re very limited. I mean, Darkman is about the closest thing I can think of. It’s like Darkman, Hellboy, and Constantine. I would love to make a horror hero if anybody’s listening. I’d love to get considered for Clayface because that sounds pretty close. Come on, DC, come on, James [Gunn], let’s do it. I can’t do Darkman. I better do Clayface.”
Despite finding plenty of success directing features, Ruben has no plans to scale down his acting exploits, and operating on multiple fronts is the only way he knows how to do it. “Honestly, that’s how I’ve survived. I don’t just do one thing,” he said. “I would never have survived if I was just a director, if I was just an actor or just a writer.”
“So the next thing I have is a writing project that I’ve been commissioned for. I’m hoping to knock that out. I want to adapt my first film into a play. Scare Me, I think it’s kind of made for the stage. And get back to my roots a bit. But acting? Yeah, I don’t think I’ll ever not act. I would love to keep that part of my life going, if not in films and television, certainly in my work as a comic on [independent comedy platform] Dropout.”
Speaking to Ruben’s versatility and desire to pursue as varied a career as possible on either side of the camera, podcast series Marvel’s Squirrel Girl: The Unbeatable Radio Show and short-form comedy show Bat-Canned have made him the only actor to play both Tony Stark and the Joker, two of the biggest names in the pop culture zeitgeist.
“Wow, that’s actually true,” his mind being thoroughly blown. “I have, in one degree or another and one scale or another. I’m gonna put that on my résumé.” With superheroes on the brain, it was only fair to ask Ruben about his white whale: a fresh take on Sam Raimi’s cult classic Darkman. He’s spoken several times in the past about wanting to do something with Liam Neeson’s Dr Peyton Westlake, and he even recorded an audio commentary for the 4K remaster’s home video release.
“The thing is, Darkman has everything that I want to put on film as a filmmaker,” he began. “It’s fun. It’s scary. It has a wild character going mad. It has action, repulsive villains, and prosthetic effects; that combination is what inspired me to be a filmmaker, especially when you throw Sam Raimi’s filmmaking style into the mix. I mean, he’s scary Batman. He’s Freddy Krueger Batman. What’s more cool or what’s more fun than that?”
“I would die at the opportunity,” he hypothesised, which wouldn’t be ideal if he were to get a crack at Darkman. “The question is, how much do people want or need it? What might it say about today? Is it a legacy sequel, which I’ve always wanted to make? Or is it worth rebooting? Is there something exciting in the rebooting of it all? That’s the question mark.”
Outside of his obvious desire to pick up the Darkman baton, if Ruben were handed the freedom to make anything he wanted as an actor or filmmaker and the only thing he had to do to make it happen was wake up tomorrow morning, head down to the set and start working, he’d try and make it the best day of his life.
“That’s a phenomenal question,” he pondered. “I think it would be an anthology film with all my buddies. So it would be five or six short films comprising an anthology film with Aya Cash, Phoebe Robinson, Bridget Everett, and Sam Richardson. Like, everybody who worked on Werewolves, everybody who worked on Heart Eyes, everybody who worked on Scare Me.”
Elaborating, “A different cinematographer, a different musician for everyone. Basically an excuse to hire everybody I love and have worked with and then to ask each of those collaborators, ‘What would you like to do? What have you not done before? Because it’s another thing I love to bring to the table and offer actors and heads of department is, ‘OK, what are you excited about? What do you want to do?’ Because they put their backs into bringing that to fruition, and it becomes a better product.”
Ruben may have specialised in horror so far, but as blood-splattered as his feature-length filmography may be, the main thing he wants to do is work with people he trusts, respects and calls friends, which is about as wholesome as it gets.
