“I Just Want To Genre Bend.” Josh Ruben Skewers The Horror Rom-Com

When I told Josh Ruben I was a big fan of his, he had to ask a clarifying question. “A Dropout fan, a horror fan, or something else?” he asked with a knowing look. The answer was, actually, both.

I was a huge fan of his horror movies. Scare Me, his 2020 directorial debut, made a splash on Shudder with its unique quasi-anthological structure and performances from Ruben himself alongside The Boys’ Aya Cash. The very next year, he released Werewolves Within, a movie that was simultaneously a creature feature, a whodunit, a horror comedy, and a video game adaptation.

But I also grew to love him (and his seagull impression) on Dropout, the rebranded CollegeHumor streaming service. Ruben has become a regular on the improv show Make Some Noise, a member of the fan-favorite “Noise Boys” alongside Zac Oyama and Brennan Lee Mulligan.

“Could I floor it on the horror and commit to the romance?”

It took me about four years to realize both are the work of the same Josh Ruben, but looking back, it’s obvious: his improv work has always been informed by a love for film and pop culture, and his horror movies always underline the humor. Now, he’s back with another multitasking masterpiece: Heart Eyes, a Valentine’s-Day-themed slasher movie following two workplace rivals as they fight off a serial killer — and fall in love along the way. It’s the perfect distillation of Ruben’s work: a slasher movie incredibly laden with passion for the genre and the craft, as full of heart as it is every other internal organ.

“It was an incredible challenge to go, could I do Nora Ephron and Jason Lives without winking terribly much, could I floor it on the horror and commit to the romance?” Ruben tells Inverse.

Inverse spoke with Ruben about whether he pulled off that tricky balance with Heart Eyes, his horror portfolio, and the project he dreams of making.

Heart Eyes, written by Freaky’s Michael Kennedy and Christopher Landon along with Philip Murphy, follows Ally (Olivia Holt), a young professional in advertising who is forced to work with visiting employee Jay (Mason Gooding) over Valentine’s Day. Unfortunately, they find themselves squarely in the sights of the Heart Eyes Killer, a serial killer who strikes only against couples on the holiday.

“The wonderful thing about it is that the romance is a conduit to lure folks into a sense of complacency to really volley the horror,” Ruben says. “It's a perfect concoction for a horror film. You have to endear to your main character somehow. And we do it here with chemistry, with romance.”

And what chemistry it is. Gooding and Holt both have horror experience, but they really shine as romantic leads — even their blood-soaked flirty banter will have you giggling. It’s something Ruben credits entirely to the actors themselves. Without any time for a chemistry read, he had to trust his cast to bond themselves, and because they’re such “awesome people,” that’s exactly what they did.

“If they're good people, that means they're very likely down,” Ruben says. “If they're very likely down, they'll be down to rehearse, down to talk, to get vulnerable and open up, and then it'll emerge on screen.”

But the magic of Heart Eyes is more than just touchy-feely: it’s also blood and guts. We won’t spoil any of the set pieces and kills here, but Ruben teases some of his favorites: “The first kill involves a machete going through a face,” he says. “The way that we did that was really fun because the actor was in charge, the actor was operating the weapon on their prosthetic.”

But the movie’s centerpiece is probably one of the final kills, a beheading that’s so agonizingly slow I watched it from behind my fingers. “It used to be twice as long, and the studio was like, ‘Are you out of your f*cking mind?’” Ruben says. “‘Do you want to send people squealing out of the theater?’ I'm like, ‘Isn't this what people want?’ They were just like, ‘...Not that much.’”

Ruben’s made a name for himself in horror and comedy, but he’s not content with just that. “I love just popping up in places and things and not telling anybody, and then appearing and just doing stuff,” he says. “Mark Duplass is one of my heroes, and he does that. He'll just be like, ‘I'm going to pop up in The Morning Show and then I'm going to do this show about a teenager in the woods, and then I'm going to produce this incredible crime documentary and then I'm going to do my show with Patrick [Brice].’”

Currently, he’s working on “popping up” in another medium altogether. When I observed that Scare Me would work really well as a stage play because of its small cast and claustrophobic setting, Ruben confirmed he’s working on just that. “I am [working on it] with my producer Dan Powell, who had a hand in the show Oh, Mary,” he says. “People have been talking about adapting it pretty much from the moment they saw it, and what's happening in adapting the movie is it's becoming something else. So if you like the movie, it's just more of what you wanted out of the film. In a way, it's more of a stage play than it is a movie.”

“I want to keep committing to multiple genres.”

But horror movies will always be Ruben’s home. “Recently I played a game on Switch called Carrion, where you basically play as the Thing from The Thing,” he says. “It might be fun to do a movie from the perspective of just some disgusting thing, like a perspective of the movie from the thing. Could you empathize with that way that you empathize with a Pixar character?”

It may be hard to predict exactly what a Josh Ruben movie will be, but like him, they always defy categorization.

“I just want to genre bend. I want to keep committing to multiple genres and just kind of tonally balance it all properly with this incredible team that I've amassed over the years,” he says. “Ultimately, just to keep working with my friends would be the dream.”

Heart Eyes is now playing in theaters.