More Than a Chick Flick With Bats: The Descent Reminds Us Horror Can Be Scary
10/30/2006
The Descent. Neil Marshall, dir. 2005.
After suffering through a recent crop of “horror” films that were not horrifying, but horrible—in both concept and execution, it is a nice change of pace to see something in the theater that is not only atmospheric and creepy, but genuinely frightening. Written and directed by Neil Marshall, the British release The Descent is a film that is at times reminiscent of a blockbuster, finely produced film like Alien and an independent movie like The Blair Witch Project. Those comparisons notwithstanding, Marshall’s movie manages to carve out its own niche.
The story concerns a group of six women who have come together for a spelunking expedition in rural Appalachia, following the sudden death of the husband and child of one of the participants. The two main characters (deftly played by Shauna Macdonald and Natalie Mendoza) have issues with one another, and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the caverns and the other dangers that befall the group only exacerbate the personal tensions between the two.
But this is much more than a character-based film with a gothic feel. The main focus is on the horrifying situation the women find themselves in once they begin their descent into the caves. Intentionally or not, this part of the story line is loosely based on the saga of a real-life Scottish robber/cannibal named Sawney Beane, who lived in a cavern system with a clan of inbred descendents during the 1600’s. In The Descent, the cannibal tribe is so conditioned to their environment that they scarcely qualify as being human. At this point I must point out that anything I have stated here should not qualify as a spoiler, because what makes the film unique is the way that Marshall tells the story. Under his more than competent direction, false scares of the type that were laughable in the recent An American Haunting are actually unnerving. As you can imagine, the tension builds and builds in the claustrophobic confines of the cavern system, and the story is plausible enough to force the viewer to go with the women, step by step, further and further into the dark abyss, as they find themselves in a situation so terrifying that it defies rational contemplation—they are being hunted as food by creatures that have every advantage, given the setting.
The only drawbacks to the film are the ending (which seems a bit convoluted, given the clarity of the rest of The Descent), and a brief bout with some sub-par special effects that involve some computer generated bats. Otherwise, viewers will find out why this movie is one of the few horror films Roger Ebert has ever given four stars too, and why it currently ranks as one of his best picks of 2006: The Descent is more than a cut above the level of recent horror releases. It literally looms darkly over them and dwarves them.