At a fairly crucial point in Monday’s preview screening of Neil Marshall’s wonderful new horror film The Descent, a man stepped out of the Walter Reade Theater to collect his senses. “Man, that shit is scary,” he muttered. He inhaled, chuckled tensely and walked back into the theater for the climax.
Such is The Descent‘s appeal–draining, terrifying and so compulsively watchable that even the most fragile of viewers would shrivel their noses in benign disgust before turning their heads in distaste. Taking a quick breather from a film about a caving expedition gone wrong seems intuitive enough, I suppose, but Marshall’s taut narrative and exquisite technique defy staying away for long. If nothing else, The Descent adopts a horror style so endangered that it transcends lost art and acquires the luster of holy trinity: robust frights, liberal gore and six characters (or more notably, six women) whose interpersonal dynamics reflect the complexity of the cave system that traps them.
“Up until that point, I couldn’t think of any examples that had come before,” Marshall (above) told the audience at Lincoln Center. “And it seemed such an ideal environment. There are so many ways to die in caving–it’s considered to be the most dangerous ‘dangerous sport.’ There’s falling and dark and paranoia and psychosis and claustrophobia–you name it. There are all these horrendous ways of going in caves, and I thought, ‘This is the right environment to set a horror film in.'”
And that is not even acknowledging the “crawlers” who threaten the sextet, or the grudges and guilt polluting the women’s survival efforts. For starters, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) resents Juno (Natalie Mendoza) for fleeing her side after the tragic death of her husband and daughter a year before. Reunited in Appalachia with four friends and acquaintances, the pair bond over the outdoors and, eventually, the underground. But Juno’s overreaching quest to make things right forsakes catharsis for pride, and soon the women are lost in beneath the earth in caves way, way off the map. Not that Juno brought a map, of course.
The terror of close quarters emerges well before the group’s understanding that they are not alone, making claustrophobia sort of a broad macguffin once Marshall’s slick, screeching carnivores set upon them. And they are slick: Unpretentious in every way, Marshall’s blind, limber humanoid predators are little more than guys in slimy makeup and milky contact lenses, but their invisibility and sameness make them as formidable as any high-tech horror villain of the last decade. In their flight, the group gets split up, and in the attrition that follows, old wounds rub raw. Despite everything, scores must be settled.

Our fearful leader: Natalie Mendoza in The Descent (Photo: Lionsgate)
Marshall admits drafting and redrafting his script to accommodate characters who were “much more real and human.” Keeping his last film–the male-bonding horror exercise Dog Soldiers–in mind, however, it is not hard to invoke a devil’s-advocate position recognizing these women’s decisions to turn on each other. Their motivations are not always clear (Juno’s attempts to help Sarah teeter between earnestness and disingenuousness), and their politics are not especially conducive to progress. At least as The Descent portrays it, vengeance has its own rewards, but it fails mightily as a feminist touchstone.
And Monday at Lincoln Center, at least one viewer objected to this part of Marshall’s vision. “Why women, and why so unflattering?” he asked.
“‘Why women, and why so unflattering?'” Marshall repeated. “Why do you think it’s unflattering?”
“You have women who run and break their legs, you have an egomaniac, and you have a… well, Sigourney Weaver wanna-be, I would say.”
“Um…” Marshall started. “Well, I think that’s just what regular people might do under those kinds of situations. They’re not meant to be superheroes. They’re not soldiers. They’re neither. They’re just civilians. And when the shit hits the fan, some of them run. Some of them don’t run. Some of them fight. And, yeah, there’s an egomaniac involved, but yeah, out of six people, every so often you get an egomaniac. I wasn’t trying to make flattering portrayals of women; I was trying to make accurate portrayals of humans. The whole point of using women in the film was that it wasn’t about them being women. … It would have been exactly the same story had it been a bunch of men.”
I tend to side with Marshall, although the bitchiness-as-gratuitous-emotional-arc camp could mount a decent argument. At any rate, rest assured there will be more of this debate (hopefully more articulate; the critic took three tries before giving up on the word ‘egomaniac’) when The Descent opens nationally Aug. 4. Look for me in the lobby, watching for defectors.

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