‘Heart Eyes’ Director Josh Ruben Dishes On Designing the Film’s Mask
Josh Ruben is a renaissance man, of sorts. He’s an actor and a comedian, appearing in films like The Wounded Fawn and showing up occasionally in the milieu of programming on the hit comedy network Dropout. But, he’s also a writer and director, with his two hit indie horror features Scare Me and Werewolves Within garnering him the genre spotlight. Now, he’s back with his third feature, Heart Eyes. Here, with a bigger budget thanks to Spyglass (who have been under fire due to their stance on Palestine), Ruben gets bloodier than ever.
In a recent interview on the Dread podcast Scarred for Life, Ruben explained, “I feel like there’s been a bit of desire really from my first film for me to floor it a little bit. People want to see me like really go for it… And this was an amazing opportunity for me to do that, to go scarier, to make it my bloodiest effort yet. And I’m stoked. People love blood. We love blood.”
And bloody it most certainly is. In the new Valentine’s Day slasher, “For the past several years, the ‘Heart Eyes Killer’ has wreaked havoc on Valentine’s Day by stalking and murdering romantic couples. This Valentine’s Day, no couple is safe…“
Written by Phillip Murphy and Christopher Landon & Michael Kennedy, this nasty slasher was right up Ruben’s alley and he knew exactly how to get the gig in his pitch to the studio.
He told Scarred For Life, “When I pitched this, I was like, ‘I think we could do something that feels evocative of Nancy Meyers meets Jason Lives and I think it works.”
Designing The Iconic Heart Eyes Mask
But when it came to mask, Ruben knew it had to be perfect.
“It was always in the script that it would be some sort of twisted version of the heart eyes emoji, which my shoulders went up a bit at the prospect of what that might be,” he said. “I pictured a giant emoji head. And obviously, that’s not something anybody wanted.”
But once Ruben learned that Tony Gardner would be creating the film’s mask, Ruben knew he was in good hands. “The dude worked on Dark Man, my dream!”
So they got to work creating their mask, trying to create something unique and iconic. “We had so many different versions of the mask. There was a Pinhead-like version, we had an homage to My Bloody Valentine (1981), we had a spiky face and a spiky helmet, we had gas masks we had all kinds of different versions,” he explained.
“We always knew that he’d have heart-shaped eyes. It was sort of a matter of, how twisted could we make we take this idea,” Ruben added. “And once Chris Landon pitched smeared old blood across his face, the kind of decrepit nature of the mask, the history of the mask, that really put it over the edge. That just gave it a chilling kind of nastiness. And it’s extra scary.”
Listen to the entire interview on the latest episode of Scarred for Life!
Scarred For Life is the podcast where co-hosts Mary Beth McAndrews and Terry Mesnard interview their guests about the films that terrified them as children. They publish two episodes a week, with their main episodes publishing on Mondays and their minisodes publishing on Fridays.
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