“Down there, it’s pitch black.”
What is darkness? Is it the unknown we fear? Is it the subconscious where we dump our intrusive and abhorrent thoughts we can’t tame or take hold of? Whatever it may be, one thing is certain: it’s where the monsters live — real and imagined. Beasts that conceive like nightmares do, from horrific visions, flashes of fear, and bedrocks of barbarism. Though we can’t see them, we hear their far-reaching shrieks, smell their putrid flesh as it penetrates our nasal cavities, and sense their shadows growing above us before we can see them coming. Little devils, crawling under the surface of the earth, of the mind. They are the opposite of us: inhuman, animalistic, ferocious creatures.
After numerous watches, that’s what The Descent still feels like.
In Neil Marshall’s 2005 horror masterpiece, darkness emerges as a living organism. It shifts and lurks and claws its way into our nerves, under our skin, and eventually, inside our heads. The Descent starts out as a standard trip-to-nature-gone-wrong monster flick but slowly evolves into an elemental, scuzzy hellscape fused with a lamentation on grief, betrayal, and loss. From tiny seeds of conflicts, it blossoms into a visceral, trauma-infested swamp ready to devour our flesh and soul literally and figuratively.
It’s fascinating how easily Marshall slips in layer onto layer, crafting a smoldering fireball made out of panic, guilt, and ferocity. At first, you don’t even realize that every single gesture and interaction between the all-female cast tells a story. The same story from different angles. It’s seamless and sneaky — precisely how a terrible mystery should be conveyed in a horror — brewing and growling under the cover of a creature feature.
(Though the film is nearly 20 years old, this is where I need to warn you about spoilers if you still haven’t seen it. Which you should, and then come back to continue reading).
Juno (Natalie Mendoza), the group’s leader, harbors a great secret from the beginning. Marshall’s script only hints at it in throwaway lines, carefully signaling something that can’t stay hidden for long. The crawlers’ slow emergence corresponds to what Juno is hiding. She wants to fix what she's done to Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), but the outcome turns catastrophic. Just like you can’t absolve yourself without confession, you can’t make having an affair with your best friend’s husband disappear by organizing a spelunking in an unexplored cave in the Appalachian Mountains. Or at least it’s not advisable because you might run into a bunch of cannibalistic bastards who end up killing your friends and revealing your immoral wrongdoings.
That said, I’ll slightly change course here. There’s a popular interpretation among Descent fans that poses an intriguing theory. It goes like this: the crawlers only exist in Sarah’s mind — we know that she’s on medication and that she hasn’t fully recovered mentally from losing her husband and daughter in a car crash a year ago — and in reality, she's the one who murders all of her friends one by one. Though I don’t think this is an entirely plausible hypothesis (for various plot-related reasons), it does feed into Marshall's bleak and devastating vision.
The events that take place down there (before we even see any bald weirdos in their full glory) trigger something in Sarah. Something that gradually picks at her sanity, slowly untying a feral madness in her, which eventually strips away her humanity bit by bit almost completely. You can even pinpoint when she snaps — the iconic blood bath scene — and turns into a raging, rogue Amazon. Her transformation is the manifestation of darkness consuming and depraving a human being to its primitive essence. It's not just the literal dark that surrounds Sarah but the blackness in her mind that sets in like a ubiquitous and numbing fog. Her pain, love, and fury crystallizing into one potent matter.
Through this carefully built narrative and deft, if extremely gory, execution, Marshall deconstructs man to its bare and primal fundamentals. It’s almost like he’s making a showcase of de-civilization via a survival horror, continuously taking away every facet of human affection, to demonstrate what it takes to survive, to become an animal again. As if he's saying: if we abandon light and let darkness swallow us without fighting for a way out, we might as well let go of everything that makes us human.
Yet, as depressive and forlorn as the movie’s ending is (the original, not the softened American version), I believe Marshall leaves us with a fraction of hope in our species. Sarah might've gone crazy and turned into an unhinged killing machine, but she hasn’t completely lost the core element of what made her human yet. Her love for her daughter remains intact and overtakes her mind in the final moments instead of forcing her to face the harsh reality, which ultimately offers nothing but suffering and death. Though darkness may have won, her light never went out.
Whether the monsters are real or just figments of imagination, they are there to draw a line between man and beast — and to show how easy it is to erase it.
P.S.: I considered including The Descent in my Horror Aughts series, but I believe it’s still such an often-cited and beloved (deservedly) film among horror fans and critics that I thought it wouldn't fit in there perfectly. I wrote about it, anyway. Happy Halloween!
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This, Let The Right One In, and Trick R Treat are up there for me personally.
The Descent is one of my favorite horror movies. And I've never seen a theater collectively freak out like they did with that headlamp jump scare.