The Ruins

Tourists, a Mayan pyramid, and a vine with intent. It is considerably nastier than its reputation and much better than the poster suggests.

Four Americans and a German go looking for a friend at an archaeological dig. The locals surround the hill and will not let them come down, which is explained late and is the most frightening thing in the film.

Scott Smith adapted his own novel and kept the thing that makes it work: the plant is not the antagonist so much as the situation, and the horror is a group of people performing amateur surgery on each other in a tent because there is no alternative.

There is a sequence involving a phone ringing that is one of the cruellest ideas in modern horror.

The theatrical ending was changed. The unrated cut is bleaker and correct.