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Deep Dread: Getting to the Bottom of THE DESCENT

Written By:

Michael Coldwell
descent

You really have to wonder at some people’s definition of ‘leisure pursuit’. Exploring caves is fine and dandy, we’ve all done that on our hols, but proper potholing down into freezing, pitch-black caverns hundreds of feet below ground requires a special kind of steely nerve. Physical strength and agility are must-haves, but you also need a clear head and quick wits to ensure you’re ready to take decisive action if anything goes wrong with your rope or harness. Then there’s that squeaking support hook you’ve just hammered into a crack in the rock above your head that’s now bearing your entire body weight as you dangle a thousand feet over a terrifying sheer-drop into the unknown. You don’t get that at Butlins (no wonder they’re down to just three resorts in the UK – Bognor, Minehead, and Skegness to be precise).

One thing even the best cavers don’t expect to encounter in the timeless bowels of the earth is a local population of pale, dead-eyed, cannibal skinheads (for that, you probably would be better off visiting Bognor, Minehead, or Skegness). But that’s the savage reception awaiting six adventuring girlfriends who take themselves off on a North Carolina potholing weekend in director Neil Marshall’s UK horror movie The Descent, released to considerable acclaim in 2006. Their expedition into Chattanooga Park in the Appalachian Mountains (very convincingly realised in Ashridge Forrest in Buckinghamshire and on studio sets at Pinewood) takes place under a cowl of sadness, exactly a year after one of their number, Sarah Carter (Shauna Macdonald) experienced a horrendous car accident that killed her husband and daughter. Did we mention this wasn’t a comedy? It’s not a comedy.

To really hammer in that point, the film begins with a joltingly brutal flashback to Sarah’s horror crash that will have the DIY enthusiasts among you doubling-up the bindings on your roof rack the next time you pop down to B&Q for some copper piping. The next thing Sarah knows, she’s awoken in a rather grim old hospital, screaming in realisation of her predicament. It’s a scream we will come to know very well over the next 95 minutes.

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One year on, and Sarah meets up with her friends at an Evil Dead-style cabin in the woods. Here, the sextet is completed by Sam (UK telly mainstay MyAnna Buring), Beth (Alex Reid), Rebecca (Saskia Mulder) plus punky newcomer and self-proclaimed ‘mentalist’ Holly (Nora-Jane Noone). Leading their expedition underground is strident alpha female Juno (Natalie Mendoza), who may well be harbouring a shameful secret involving Sarah’s late husband’s trouser area. There will be some serious ‘to be continued’ between Juno and Sarah.

Soon, the gang commence their spelunking (that’s a word, it means ‘cave exploring’), plunging into the darkness of a deep cavern Juno has selected. While inching themselves through a particularly claustrophobic orifice, their exit is blocked by a rockfall. No problem though – experienced cavers always inform the authorities where they’re going, so they’ll all be rescued soon enough, right? Wrong! Juno has been economical with the truth in more ways than one; not only is this a completely uncharted cave system, she’s told the park rangers they were visiting another cave entirely. So – bugger! – no one knows where the hell they are. Nice one, sister. All the girls can do now is keep venturing on their current downward trajectory, squeezing themselves through ever-more dangerous gullies in the hope they’ll eventually find a way back up to the surface.

When they come to the inevitable giant gaping chasm and begin carefully winching themselves across it, Becca spies a rusty rope hook pre-hammered into the rock that’s at least a hundred years old. So, what befell the people who first came here? The answer comes looming out of dark soon enough in the form of the Crawlers – horrendous, humanoid nasties with a taste for tender flesh. Blind of sight and pure of instinct, their domain is a nightmarish carpet of their victims’ bones. The scene is set for a relentless, desperate battle for survival in the darkness…

A drinking game to spot all the genre references Neil Marshall has coded into The Descent might be fun at first but there are so many of them we’d advise close medical supervision and a stomach pump to hand just in case (our Assistant Editor Martin Unsworth will rent you his for half price if you book it at least week in advance). From the visceral jump-deaths of the Alien series and Predator to the bizarre culture shocks of The Hills Have Eyes and Deliverance to the tragic emotional trauma of Don’t Look Now, the film deftly riffs on the classics while keeping enough tricks of its own in reserve to have you grinding your teeth in anticipation of the next nasty jolt. Quite a feat, that.

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It’s also to the film’s credit that it doesn’t overplay the all-female angle. If you come to The Descent expecting a meta-textual redefinition of the horror film through a feminist gauze, you’re better off watching Aliens again. Because, thanks in no small part to Sigourney Weaver’s pioneering work, the action-horror gender rulebook has been re-drawn to the point that it may only occur to you afterwards that, bar the opening scene, there are no conventional male characters in it at all.

Unconventional male characters? That would be the Crawlers (female ones too, we assume). Truly nightmarish demons of the dark, they resemble Gollum’s full-size cousins, but are more effective for being played by actors in costumes and make-up rather than rendered with tiresome mo-cap CGI. No offence, Andy Serkis, but this is one gig we’re glad you didn’t get. Neil Marshall envisaged the Crawlers as cavemen who never found a way out, evolving over thousands of years to become pale, blind savages. Despite only a few onscreen hints to their origin, we instinctively understand that they are not really monsters at all, which, like Wes Craven’s savage predators in The Hills Have Eyes and the tragic cannibal in the London Underground classic Death Line, only makes them more horrific as a concept.

As the haunted Sarah, Shauna Macdonald has the scream queen toolkit down pat. Tortured by survivor’s guilt and paranoid around Juno, the darkness drives her ever further into hallucination and mania. By the final act, she’s tearing about like the missing link between Marilyn Burns from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Sissy Spacek from Carrie. Rather pleasingly, when she’s not streaked in blood and sweat, Macdonald bears a striking resemblance to Catriona MacColl, Lucio Fulci’s leading lady of choice during his early ‘80s imperial phase of ocular violence and maggots.

Sharing lead duties as hard-ass expedition leader and de facto villain Juno, Natalie Mendoza plays up the nervous tension with Sarah, superficially keen for the trip to repair their relationship but unable to paper over her own duplicitous streak or a thirst for danger that ends up pitching the whole gang into the seventh circle of hell. Her full-blown Terminator-mode in the final act gets the pulse racing and brings a redemption of sorts, but let’s face it, with friends like Juno, who needs enemies.

The ensemble supporting cast have their work cut out trying to distinguish their characters in the darkness, but all deliver winning turns that make the necessary business of getting gorily picked off one-by-one by savage cavemen far more emotionally resonant than in your average gorefest. We know the territory; it’s not so much will they die as when and how nastily. Inevitably, there’s a tonal gear change halfway through The Decent when their low-key naturalism is supplanted by the broader dramatic clichés we expect when death is a sudden possibility. But, like the crew of the Nostromo in Alien, because the character groundwork has been skilfully laid from the start, each time fate does come calling, there is a genuine sense of loss amid all the snapping of bones and ripping of flesh.

This was Marshall’s second feature following Dog Soldiers (2002), his bonkers tale of werewolves vs. squaddies in rural Wales. He’s since directed Doomsday (2008) and the Michael Fassbender vehicle Centurion (2010) but The Descent remains the critical high watermark of his movie career to date. More recently, he’s forged a path directing high-end genre TV shows, including well-regarded episodes of Game of Thrones, Westworld, and Hannibal. Marshall is currently lined up to direct episodes of next year’s reboot of Lost In Space before returning to the big screen for yet another reboot – this time of the Hellboy franchise, though not, sad to say, with Ron Perlman returning to the title role (and the Perlmanverse is sadder place because of it). Jumping ship from TV to cinema franchises isn’t always plain sailing, of course – just ask Marshall’s Game of Thrones alumnus Alan Taylor, who underwhelmed with Thor: The Dark Word and Terminator Genisys before hungrily re-attaching himself to the GoT teat like a ravenous infant. But to us, Neil Marshall and Hellboy sounds like a good match, so fingers crossed he won’t need to ‘do an Alan’ soon afterwards.

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The Descent certainly did the business on release, making $57 million worldwide from a modest production budget of £3.5 million. Far be it for us to get sniffy about UK-centric horror films, but we suspect a major factor in its success was the nifty trick it pulls off making us think we’re watching an American movie. The international cast, very convincing location work, excellent studio cave sets and a sprinkling of American vehicles all add texture to the illusion, but the real reason is Neil Marshall’s genre-savvy direction, born of his love of horror films and innate understanding of how the likes of Carpenter, Raimi, and Craven twitched the nerve of audiences worldwide. His flair for action is just as vital – that precarious, chasm-crossing scene will have beads of sweat jumping off your forehead, while the Crawler attacks – a blizzard of savage movements and quick edits – are kinetically brilliant moments. Visually, Marshall and cinematographer Sam McCurdy achieve wonders. Using the pitch darkness of the cave as their base canvass, they paint the screen with probing torchlights and the eerie glow of red and green flares before giving it over completely to the full-on hallucinatory assault of the final act.

It all adds up to a low-budget independent horror movie that looks amazing and lacks for nothing. It’s a good job it wasn’t made twenty years earlier, as it would probably have suffered the indignity of being a Golan/Globus Cannon production with all the grotty association that went with it. But by the time The Descent was released in 2006, thanks in no small part to the prior success of The Blair Witch Project, the ‘low budget horror’ stigma was in the process of being dispelled. Now, in 2017, the tables have turned so profoundly that it’s genuinely surprising when a major studio horror movie delivers anything close to the ferocious energy of independent gems like this.

Eleven years on from its release, we’re pleased to report that The Descent has lost none of its power. A slick and brutally efficient sucker punch of contemporary horror shot through with classic influences, you’ll need a stiff drink or three afterwards to stand any chance of getting to sleep. Pour us one while you’re about it, would you? Down the hatch…

You can enter the world of THE DESCENT when it screens on Horror Channel on December 20th. Sky 319, Virgin 149, Freeview 70, Freesat 138.

Michael Coldwell

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