Classic Horror Movie Review: 'The Descent'

6 women on a cave exploring trip find themselves face to face with underground cave-dwelling cannibals. It sounds goofy, but as executed in the sensational horror film The Descent it's a terrifying series of gory, edge of your seat, horror that you watch through your fingers. Writer-director Neil Marshall who became known as the director of the much talked about but little seen Dog Soldiers, nails moments of pure, honest ,terror, a rarity in modern horror, by using his unique location and suffocating close up photography and lighting.

The Descent did not break any new ground in terms of the horror genre in 2005. What Neil Marshall and his team did was take familiar horror film elements and simply do them better than they have been done before. Using the tools at hand, location, lighting, camerawork and acting, Marshall crafted The Descent better than most similar films. Marshall’s brilliance came from simply being more skilled than other directors who bathe their films in blood and gore with little skill.

Shauna McDonald as Sarah, the films lead, supplies the film’s biggest moments from a terrifying opening sequence in which she's involved in a brutal car accident, to the hero moment where, while covered head to toe in blood and viscera, she stands astride a dead cannibal looking like Ripley from Alien. This may not be the stuff of Academy Awards glory but for a horror film these moments are iconic.

There is little I don't love about The Descent. The cast lead, by Shauna McDonald and including Natalie Jackson Mendoza as the hard driving Juno, Alex Reid as the wary and cautious Beth, Saskia Mulder as Becca, MyAnna Buring as Becca's little sister Sam and Nora Jane Noone as Holly, form a tight core of toughness, guile and wit. Sure they make a few typical horror movie mistakes but you never get the impression of characters who are simply cannon fodder for horror movie killers.

The horrors that befall the women of The Descent are brutally realized with more gore than you are expecting and yet it never feels exploitative. Neil Marshall's camera does not have that creepy lingering quality that too many horror film directors seem to strive for. Keeping his camera close to his actors and in almost constant motion, Marshall makes you feel their terror and pain with his ingenious filmmaking technique.

It would be very simplistic to praise The Descent for it's girl power themes and a cast that features a group of strong willed women. With a movie I like as much as The Descent I think using the term girl power is a little demeaning. I prefer to think of the strong willed feminism at the core of The Descent is what I brought to The Descent in my own sociological perspective. The real strength of the film is the simple fact that it's actually scary.

A horror movie with real horror, The Descent was and is a sensational picture. Neil Marshall announced his arrival not just as another genre filmmaker but a real auteur working inside a genre. It’s a shame that Neil Marshall never lived up to the promise of The Descent. His follow up film, 2008’s Doomsday was a dreary mess and things have only gotten worse. In 2019, Marshall helmed the reboot of Hellboy and made what was arguably the worst movie of 2019 in the process.

Regardless of Marshall’s post The Descent career, there is still The Descent, an awesome, incredibly crafted horror movie. The Descent will always be one of my favorite horror movies of all time and even something as remarkably awful as Hellboy 2019 can’t take that away from. The Descent rocked me, to this day when I revisit it, I cannot help but get caught up in the bloody, gruesome, intense and terrifying atmosphere of The Descent.