Courtesy of Pathé Distribution

What is the scariest movie you have ever seen? The most claustrophobic? The one with the most terrifying creatures? The one that utilizes the setting most effectively? The one with the most potently threaded themes? For me, and for many, The Descent (Neil Marshall) is the only answer. Since its release, it has held a place on the top of horror rankings everywhere, ones with titles like “Scariest Movies of the 21st Century” or “Most Claustrophobic Horror Movies Ever” (which it landed at #13 and #2, respectively)– it’s a horror film held in incredibly high regard. It gained its reputation through two means: a terrifying danger drawn from natural environments and an added layer of creature-feature subgenre work in the second half.

The terrifying journey into labyrinthian cave systems remains an unmatched outing of claustrophobia, hopelessness, and isolation. Even 20 years after its release, The Descent stands high in the horror zeitgeist due to its excellent structure and oppressive mood. It had been ten years since I last saw The Descent, and I wanted to revisit the grip it had on me and so many others and to see how well it actually held up.

The film opens with a thrill-seeking group of friends white-water rafting. The extreme sports go off without a hitch, but on the way home, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) gets into an accident with her family, which kills her husband and her daughter. It is an incredibly jolting scene, one that still holds its shock value. The silence that follows the crushingly loud accident is harrowing, and soaks you in the aftermath of a life-changing event. A year later, Sarah goes on her first outing with the group, cave-diving in the Appalachian Mountains, since the incredibly traumatic experience.

Her memories become a recurring visual theme from her perspective. Her trauma isn’t the central theme of the movie, and the horror of this movie isn’t just a literalized analogy for her trauma. Marshall uses Sarah’s experiences as texture and supplemental means for horror, rather than a textual transcription of the horror on display. Sarah is the protagonist of the film, and the one who is suffering the most. She is the only one truly suffering mental torture caused by her memories. She experiences a descent in three ways: mentally, physically, and metaphorically. Her mental health, the trek she is taking, and the danger she is in are all descending rapidly. 

Courtesy of Pathé Distribution

While cave-diving, Sarah and her group of friends realize they have been led astray by their friend, Juno (Natalie Mendoza), and are in an undiscovered cave system. Juno becomes another source of distress and danger for Sarah, as we find she has hidden secrets and ulterior motives as the movie continues. When the cave-diving goes wrong, Marshall and his team create a stunning display of environmental horror. The juxtaposition between traveling through hollow graves into cavernous pits and cliffs is incredibly effective. This, with a retrospective lens, is an incredibly strong stretch of the movie, one that has aged particularly well. The immediate inherent claustrophobia of cave-diving is lit and shot perfectly, to accentuate the tight corners and wet walls. It feels as if, when crawling through tiny spaces, the dust and dirt polluting the air is genuinely suffocating. It is gorgeously executed: once they get lost in the caves, the lighting is primarily from headlamps, flashlights, and flares, accentuating the isolating and sickening feeling of being completely vulnerable to the caves.

I am not a claustrophobic person, and movies that really rely on tapping into that fear typically don’t get a strong response from me. This is the exception. Every dark corner they turn feels like they are steps away from being trapped for the rest of their lives, or crushed by a huge piece of stalactite. Eventually, we get some non-diegetic lighting as the chaos reaches its apex, which feels hallucinatory and stylish. There is no shortage of excellent visual craft on display.

The Descent thrives in being a genuinely terrifying excursion into nature, and escalates that initially tense concept with vicious cryptids. When the creatures are introduced fully, in a now iconic scene, the film loses its momentum a little bit, in my opinion. The practical design of the creatures is excellently done, but there is a tonal and structural shift that doesn’t necessarily work great for the rest of the film. There are certainly some great scares to be found, but it comes across a bit whackier and more cartoonish in a way that deflates the previously built tension.

Again, it’s not every time the creatures are on screen, but when they are up-close and personal, it almost feels like they aren’t quite sure how to execute the confrontations between the main cast and their adversaries. The raw, visceral violence that the dwellers end up inflicting is the most affecting piece of their story. The brutalizing that some of the lost explorers experience is a nightmare put to screen. The practical effects hold up incredibly well; the rapid-cutting fight scenes and the distracting jump scares do not. I think some of the logic is traded for stunning visuals: the lake of blood is a haunting and iconic image, but also pretty nonsensical and illegible, which clashes with how grounded and rooted in reality the film’s logic had been so far. The only other movie I can think of that both attempts and lands this switch-up of threats is Barbarian — shifting from environmentally/situationally driven horror to a monstrous physical threat. It’s always a joy to see a movie pull the rug out from under you and its characters.

The Descent has certainly held up well on a technical level–the use of setting and environment to escalate is incredible. I don’t think I have seen a movie that does it much better. The performances are all so real and raw, and every character feels like a lived-in member of this complicated, long-lasting friend group. I actually think the only part that didn’t live up to the status I held it to in my mind was all the creature pieces, which I remembered being the most scared by. The Descent is still a great piece of horror, one that truly attacks you from different angles, with varying degrees of success, and it makes sense why its relevance has been maintained for the past 20 years. 

Tags: Neil Marshall Shauna MacDonald The Descent

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