The Descent

DIRECTED BY: Neil Marshall
WRITTEN BY: Neil Marshall
STARRING: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder, Nora Jane Noone, MyAnna Buring

Let’s face it, modern horror has suffered a slight case of anaemia of late; with the notable exception of Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever & Zack Snyder’s rather excellent Dawn of the Dead, most U.S horror films seem to consist of annoyingly attractive starlets being cleverly slaughtered in relatively bloodless, self-referential exercises in style. The visceral quality that grabbed audiences by the throat in Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre seems to have ebbed away to the confines of cheap horror destined for the straight-to-video wasteland.

In 2002, British Filmmaker Neil Marshall wrote and directed his debut feature: Dog Soldiers. A strange concoction of genre clichés (werewolves, log cabins) its witty script and brutal horror proved a success with critics and audiences alike. Along with recent efforts, such as Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Ed Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, it’s helped pull the Brit-horror genre kicking and screaming from its tepid mire. Marshall’s sophomore effort, The Descent is out on July 8th and promises to be an altogether different animal, grounding itself very much in reality in order to mine its scares.

The story follows bereaved widow, Sarah (Macdonald) and her good intentioned friends Juno (Mendoza) and Beth (Reid) taking her on a caving holiday in the remote Appalachian mountains in the U.S. Along for the ride are half-sisters Rebecca (Mulder) and Sam (Buring) and BASE-jumping thrill-seeker Holly (Noone)
After a series of errors (and one character’s bad judgement call) the women soon find themselves lost in the cave system and they struggle to discover a way out. They soon stumble upon evidence of something living deep in the caverns and they realise that they may soon become prey to something far more malevolent and far more disturbing than a wild animal; a creature without mercy or reason, with an unquenchable taste for human flesh. As their grotesque adversaries attack, terror causes the group to fray at the edges, loyalties disintegrate and the group sink into madness.

The female cast admirably hold their own, in roles that require not only believability but also a large degree of physical stamina. The films deliberate pacing, mood-building and eye for character development means that the moments of gore and brutality (and there are many) pay-off admirably. Once the films bizarre antagonists present themselves, it kicks into high gear with some profoundly disturbing moments involving claustrophobia in small spaces, cannibalism, brutal climbing injuries and one sequence featuring a character completely immersing herself in a deep bog of blood, guts and bodily fluids.

The Descent was filmed at Pinewood studios, where the cavern sets were constructed by Production Designer Simon Bowles (who had previously worked with Marshall on Dog Soldiers) with an eye for authenticity and claustrophobia. Larger cave climbing sequences were digitally composited but considering this, the films budgetary constraints have been well concealed. These cramped subterranean environs seem an obvious setting for a film of this kind and Marshall and Cinematographer Sam McCurdy make the most of the surroundings utilising the available light sources of blue-hued phosphorous and sickly green glow-sticks.

Marshall has created something of a companion-piece to his all-male Dog Soldiers.
An all-female horror that defies plot prediction and respects its characters enough to not have them dissolve into scream-queens the minute a threat presents itself. Several of the characters could even give Linda T2 Hamilton a run for her money in the alpha-female-brutal-ass-kicking stakes. While The Descent is hardly blazing a trail in terms of the genre, it does manage to breathe brutal and visceral fresh air into what is unavoidably, well-traversed terrain. It should be applauded for achieving what very few modern horrors can: it scares the living shit out of you.

JARROD WALKER