February 14 becomes a fight for life after a pair of coworkers are targeted by a serial killer in Director Josh Ruben’s horror comedy, Heart Eyes.
Ruben’s film tells the tale of Ally, a cynical ad executive and Jay, her hopelessly romantic colleague, who mistakenly become the next target of “Heart Eyes,” a masked maniac with glowing, red eyes who returns every Valentine's Day to slaughter unsuspecting couples.
On April 15, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Ruben discussed the making of Heart Eyes during a Q&A moderated by Director Zelda Williams (Lisa Frankenstein).
During the conversation, Ruben spoke about how he balanced the tones of horror and comedy.
“We always came back to legitimately Nora Ephron and legitimately Wes Craven. Let’s not shortchange either genre. So how can we never play terror for real and never caught trying to be funny. It was a bit of a challenge because we had a myriad of takes and options. What I realized — with our types of genre benders — is it is music. If you watch Halloween, it’s wall-to-wall score. It just kind of gets under your skin, kind of helps get you there. And if we decided to do something that’s a little more telling for the comedy and gave everybody a big hat or something it would have diluted the threat.”
Ruben’s other directorial credits include the feature films Werewolves Within and Scare Me; the television special Death to 2021; and episodes of Die Hart, Adam Ruins Everything, Step 9, That Couple You Know, Dropout, Remix the Movies and Hardly Working.
Ruben has been a DGA member since 2016.