Retrospective - The Descent (2005)

Twenty years ago, filmmaker Neil Marshall unleashed The Descent (2005) into the world, terrifying an entire generation of viewers and creating a legacy film that remains steadfast. This darkest of horror's is one of the most commercially and critically successful indie horror films to hail from the UK, with the production grossing nearly twenty times its budget and garnering an overwhelmingly positive reception. Although The Descent has celebrated its twentieth anniversary, its unmatched impact on the genre only continues to thrive.  

Beneath the bloodied and gory surface, The Descent tackles the dynamics of female friendships, lingering trauma, and internal vs external isolation; all of which is explored through the nightmarish and oftentimes gut-wrenching storyline. The film unfolds around a group of friends consisting of Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), Juno (Natalie Mendoza), Beth (Alex Reid), Sam (MyAnna Buring), Rebecca (Sasha Mulder), and Holly (Nora-Jane Noone), who often take to adrenaline-fuelled sports during their reunions. However, tragedy strikes after one of their thrill-seeking get-togethers when Sarah's husband, Paul (Oliver Milburn) and their daughter, Jessica (Molly Kayll), violently die in a car accident. A year passes and the group decide to reconnect in the Appalachian Mountains for a spot of spelunking, where they are soon met by a pack of feral humanoid creatures lurking deep within the unmanned caves.  

The Descent sneakily builds its suspense in layers, dishing out one horrific incident after another, essentially seesawing our expectations as to what could possibly happen next, whilst we nervously gain knowledge that the film is certainly not going to hold back on what is yet to come. The cold open's vehicle accident shows a sharp pipe tearing through a windscreen, plunging deep through Paul's forehead and back out through the headrest. Knowing that it then impaled his kin is simultaneously unexpected and brutal, instantly letting us know that Marshall does not intend to make the next ninety-nine minutes anything less than ruthless. Shortly on, another blow is inflicted after we learn that the route to the cave's entrance is blocked by an unmoveable bolder, leading the group to trek down deeper into the slippery, wild underground where Holly sustains a nasty injury which the camera does not hold back from, revealing the grossly protruding, splintered bone breaking out from her shin as Sam desperately squeezes the bone back into the skin through all the bloodied flesh and gory muscle. 

As if the group and the nervous viewer sitting on the edge of their seat, have not hit rock bottom already, the film strikes again with the unveiling that the cavers are not alone in the dark depths of the cave. What follows is an increasingly unsettling descent into the underground cavities, which can only be described as a cinematic reiteration of Dante's Inferno as the natural habitat and its lurkers form a labyrinth to which hell would be envious.  

The Descent's resident monster, also known as 'Crawlers,' is tantamount to the provocative ghastliness on show, with their appearance being textbook abjection at its finest, revolting, and emblematic of their volatile nature. The Crawlers don a skin that is pasty white, with blotchy discolouration of violent purples and reds that almost glistens due to the strange, slimy texture that coats their gangly frame. Next is their Count Orlock-esque face with pointed ears, gnarly fangs hanging from their often-gaping mouth, and a snouted nose with an uncanny Voldemort-like flatness. Vile, wretched, and loathsome are these beasts lurking in the shadowy abyss where the unfortunate hobbyists find themselves in. To say that these brutes are anything less than a visual symbol of fear itself would be criminal, but it is worth noting that what makes the Crawlers elevate from scary to complete nightmare fuel is actually what they represent. 

These monsters are, in fact, humans. The lore behind the territorial Crawlers goes that these beings are the byproducts of evolution. Marshall has revealed that an unspecified amount of time ago, cavemen inhabited the caves that Sarah and her friends find themselves trapped in, but rather than eventually leave the underground layers and evolve into humans that we have known for hundreds of years, this group of people stayed subterranean. Having had no exposure to light, the beings are entirely blind; instead, they possess acute hearing and use echolocation to identify their prey. On the 'Beneath the Scenes' featurette on The Descent DVD release, Marshall states that he wanted these "cavemen who never left the cave" to manifest what everyone's worst nightmare would be if they were lost in the basement of the world. This motivation of evoking torment and wanting to get under the viewer's skin is also enacted through the group of protagonists.  

Although fictitious, The Descent has an integral rawness to it that acts as a testament to how real the dynamics between the friends feel. At the time of The Descent's release, the premise of a group of all-female protagonists, who have been written with accuracy and are fleshed out, was unheard of. Sarah, Juno, Beth, Sam, Rebecca, and Holly are all written with a complexity that speaks to their place in reality. Indeed, these women are shown as strong-willed, capable, valiant, and brutal, but they are also flawed and at times overcome with anxiety. To portray the women as nothing but rip-roaring and fierce for every second of runtime would be a disservice to the complexity that is owed to the characters. Marshall ensures that the women possess all these attributes, whilst not shying away from the sheer worriment that the situation catalyses. It is here where The Descent grafts for its multidimensional quality. Not only is the film innately menacing, thanks to the monstrosity on display, but it also burrows deep into cerebral territory.  

All this poetry is tightly entwined by one of the film's most unnerving qualities - the caves themselves. Once the group reach the caves, the entire film becomes this claustrophobia-inducing hellscape that leaves viewers breathing in tight watching the women navigate the narrow, crumbling tunnels around them. There is no escape and the only way out for them is death. The Descent exercises this notion of being trapped with a finesse that has not been achieved since, with the film becoming an indescribably intense situation that is only exacerbated and even more hopeless via the endless and haunting tapered caverns.  

A status of being a classic alongside viewer's nostalgia are often factored into a film's success upon a special anniversary, but at face value and without the acclaim and fandom, some features appear aged. However, The Descent is truly only enhanced with time and an expert exercise in horror filmmaking.  

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