Fearful Flowers

I just read a review of the new horror film "The Ruins" which seems to be one of a few "vicious vegetation" horror movies. This film is interesting because it utilized very few CGI effects and the head of FX, as well as the director both opted for "real" effects using prosthetics and make-up primarily.

In the scene above, there were 10 different sets of legs, which had been brutally attacked by the killer plants. The legs were all made out of silicone and were originally cast from the actor, like all the other fake bodies in the movie. In this scene, other actors need to saw off this man's legs and cauterize them using a hot frying pan. This presented a problem for the FX director, "We were thinking, ‘How are we going to cauterize silicone and make it look like real flesh?’ So I sprayed cooking oil all over the silicone, heated up a piece of steel as hot as I could and applied it to the leg—and it looked like real meat cooking. It smelled like it too, because of the oil.". This type of creativity and care for making realistic props is nice to see in a world overridden with digital effects.
This scene reminded me of a favorite of mine from "Evil Dead" in which the evil woods reak havoc on people in a a cabin, until th eevil force eventually turns them all into zombies or 'evil dead'.

This is a super low-budget scene, where it is implied that the evil trees rape this woman.