The Descent - Director Neil Marshall Interview

British horror has had something of a resurgence in recent years, spearheading the push is Neil Marshall, who helmed 2002’s Dog Soldiers. I managed to have a chat with him recently, about his new horror film: The Descent. A subterranean chiller in which a group of female cave explorers run into some seriously nasty underground dwellers with a taste for human flesh. I met Marshall at a basement club in Soho, which although it’s the middle of the day, feels a little too cave like for my taste….

Each generation of horror filmmaker inevitably inspires the next, who were your horror heroes?
I guess my number one horror hero and the filmmaker who inspired me the most is John Carpenter. Halloween, The Fog and The Thing are films that I grew up with and that I just absolutely love. They’re just superb. In very different ways: Halloween is a very, very simple, economic concept and done very well. The Fog is a very creepy ghost story, well played out - quite low key in a lot of ways; it’s not the one that people often remember. The Thing just for its psychological aspects and because it’s so visceral which took it to a whole new limit and I love that, the creativity of it is just superb – and the ending, I loved the ending of The Thing, the bleakness of it all. I love the idea that that’s what horror allows you to do, to have no happy endings and too many horror films nowadays do have happy endings and I wanted to do something different.

I really liked the fact that many of the women in the film, rather than crumble into ‘scream queens’, react to the circumstances in very real ways, some of them becoming brutal and violent and fighting back and others degenerating into hysteria. What was the horror potential of an all-female cast compared to the all-male cast of Dog Soldiers?
I thought since we had women on board it was a chance to make it more brutal (laughs) I mean anyone who’s ever seen girls’ fight - it’s pretty savage stuff isn’t it? (laughs) I wanted to utilize all that hair pulling, eye poking and fingernail gouging that girls’ get into. It has a raw-ness to it but I didn’t want to make them a bunch of Ripley-Linda Hamilton types – there’s one character that does do that but there’s other characters who behave in very different kinds of ways. There’s only one character who behaves overtly heroic but she’s also an incredibly flawed individual. So I didn’t want to conform to any previous stereotypes. They’re just a bunch of disparate individuals: one’s a schoolteacher, one’s a climber, one’s a doctor – they’re not going to behave in the same way under the same circumstances. In Dog Soldiers they were a bunch of soldiers, they’re trained to behave as a unit under pressure - these girls aren’t. So there’s no way they were going to behave the same way, to do that would’ve been very wrong for the characters.
I thought it was better for scares. If you’ve got a group that sticks together, you’ve got that strength in numbers concept. Well this group doesn’t stick together, they flee, they tear each other apart: physically, psychologically, emotionally – and that makes the whole situation far more scary because you’ve got nothing to cling on to.

I wanted to ask you about working with composer, David Julyan.
(Julyan has previously worked with Christopher Nolan on Memento and Insomnia) Obviously music is one of the most important things in a horror and you’ve mentioned John Carpenter’s films as a major influence on you - (Carpenter composes his own scores) - I find Carpenter’s music creates a mood that’s far more effective than mere jumps or scares. In The Descent, Julyan’s music really helps to successfully create an atmosphere of dread. How did the opportunity to work with him come about? I wanted a very minimalist, very haunting and very atmospheric score. One day I’d love to get John Carpenter to score a film for me - that’d be fantastic, just to get him to write the music because I’ve grown up with John Carpenter’s scores in his films. But with David Julyan it was an interesting turn of events that when I was writing the script – I listen to film soundtracks when I’m writing - I was listening to the Insomnia soundtrack, just playing it again and again and again - and it’s so haunting and so visual as well. So when it came to choosing a composer I said ‘ can we have a look at getting David Julyan?’ and they did - he was available. I didn’t actually realise he was London based, I thought he was American or something, I had no idea. So he came in, I met him and he was well up for it and he agreed to do the score. For me that was just a dream come true and just brings the whole thing full circle. He has this incredible dark edge to him and he really likes exploring his dark side with his music. That was perfect for this. He’s delivered a truly memorable and haunting score that compliments the film perfectly.

Do you think you’d like to stick with the horror genre? As a director, does it interest you enough or would you like to try your hand at a drama?
Horror does absolutely interest me, I love doing it but I don’t want to just do horror - I have too many other stories to tell. The main theme that goes on with everything I write at the moment is probably action led stuff, that’s what I really enjoy doing. Action, character-led stuff and whether it’s horror or not doesn’t really matter - but I want to take it back now and do something else. I’ve explored horror in two different ways and I don’t want to get tired of it, I never want to get bored with it. So I want to go away, do something totally different and return to horror at a later date. I think that’d be a lot of fun to do.

Have you got anything planned at the moment?
I’ve got a couple of ideas, I’ve got a medieval heist movie and a World War II action thriller which is ‘Die Hard meets Remains of the Day’ (laughs) If you can piece those two together! So I’m working on a lot of ideas and who knows what’s going to be next but they’re the kinds of things I’m concentrating on. Something a little bit bigger, a little bit broader, for a broader audience but still remaining true to my roots, which is: action led, ensemble cast, tight locations – just looking at it for thrills.

Will there be a sequel to Dog Soldiers?
I believe a sequel may be happening but I’m not involved with it.

With the publicist looming in my peripheral vision, I figure it’s time to wrap up and say goodbye. I mention to Neil that I’m a fan of the ‘super-glue triage’ sequence in Dog Soldiers in which Sean Pertwee has his guts super-glued back inside his body. I tell him that it was what really put that movie over the top for me. Marshall laughs and I thank him for his time. He politely bids me goodbye and I make my way out of the subterranean club, being careful to avoid any mutated cannibals that may have escaped from Marshall’s brain and secreted themselves in a dark corner, waiting to feed on passing journalist’s.

JARROD WALKER