An alternate ending to the 2008 survival horror movie The Ruins was actually even better than the one the filmmakers ultimately decided to go with. The movie, directed by Carter Smith, is based on the 2006 novel of the same name. Scott Smith wrote the novel and also wrote the screenplay of the movie. The film's plot centers of two young American couples - Jeff and Amy (Jonathan Tucker and Jena Malone) and Eric and Stacy (Shawn Ashmore and Laura Ramsey) - who are vacationing together in Mexico. As their vacation goes on, their fun takes a terrifying turn.
The Ruins starts when the two couples meet two tourists, Mathias and Dimitri, the former of whom is looking for his lost brother. His brother, he says, was last seen at an archaeological dig at a Mayan ruin in the jungle. Jeff, Amy, Eric, and Stacy join the tourists in looking for this site; when they reach it, Mayan villagers surround them, killing Dimitri. The remaining members of the group flee up the ruin, where they find an abandoned camp area. Eventually, they learn that the vines and plants surrounding the ruins are predatory. The plants infect their bodies - a tendril of vine infests a wound on Stacy's leg - and mess with their minds by imitating sounds to trick them.
In the final ending of the movie, after nearly every character has died, Amy is the only one to escape the ruins, with Jeff sacrificing himself to help her get away. As she gets into a car and drives away, though, viewers can see vines moving around under the skin of her face, horrifyingly implying that she is infected. After she escapes, friends of one of the tourists are seen walking through the woods and looking around the temple for him, suggesting that they will suffer the same fates as the previous people. In the movie's alternate ending - which can be viewed in the unrated version — Amy does indeed get away. An apparent flash-forward shows a caretaker is seen walking around headstones at a cemetery, whistling a tune to himself. He then hears the same tune coming from a grave, and when he goes over to check it out, it's revealed that the grave is Amy's, with numerous red flowers surrounding the headstone. The caretaker reaches toward the flowers, and the screen cuts to black.
This ending of The Ruins is certainly much scarier than the ending chosen for the standard cut of the movie. It acts as an epilogue and informs viewers that Amy does indeed suffer death - probably due to the vines inside her body - and suggests that the caretaker will become infected by the flowers and most likely go on to spread the infection. While the standard ending was also eerie, it doesn't give viewers as much of an uneasy feeling. In the alternate ending, the cemetery is nowhere near the Mayan ruins where most of the movie took place, and it's horrifying to think that the supernatural plants could spread across the world.
Director Carter Smith said upon the release of The Ruins: "We shot a bunch of different stuff to see which one would work best with the finished film ... Our final decision was informed by what audiences found the most satisfying after watching a really punishing film." There was even an ending shot in which Amy simply drove away, no vines to be seen, which would have been an anticlimactic finale. Ultimately, the creators behind the movie decided to go for what they thought audiences would react to most positively, and skipped the cemetery scene. At least they avoided the disturbing ending of the book the movie is based on, which had the last surviving group member - in the book, that's Stacy - killing herself before being the vines pull her into the brush.