>>FEATURE
THE DESCENT
STARRING Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza and Nora-Jane Noone
DIRECTED BY Neil Marshall
Now playing
Uptown Screen
The most promising new filmmaker to emerge from the recent boom in British horror, Neil Marshall made an admirably grisly debut with the cheeky 2002 werewolf pic Dog Soldiers before scoring greater critical and commercial success in the UK — and now North America – with The Descent. A wickedly efficient thriller that’s shaping up to be the summer’s must-see horror pic, The Descent is set deep inside a mountain in the Appalachians, where six women are on a caving expedition. Deprived of natural light sources, all that they (or we) can see is what gets lit by their flashlights. The darkness and the environment evoke feelings of unease, disorientation and claustrophobia in viewers well before the arrival of the caves’ menacing inhabitants – nicknamed "crawlers," they prove to be a far greater threat to the women’s well-being than pointy stalactites or grouchy bats.
Though Dog Soldiers went straight-to-video in North America, The Descent earned a wide release by Lions Gate/Maple, the studio clearly hoping for a Hostel-sized hit. In a phone interview that took place while the director was promoting the film at San Diego geek fest Comic Con, Marshall was understandably excited to get that shot, especially with a movie that forgoes the cheeky tone of so many horror movies (including Dog Soldiers) for something more ruthless.
"The intention was to terrify people," says Marshall. "I’d already done the tongue-in-cheek thing with Dog Soldiers and I had no intention of repeating the same formula. When I first set out to make that film, I intended to make a scary movie, but it just kind of evolved into a black comedy. So, I was never fully satisfied with that. With this, I wanted to make something genuinely terrifying and was of the same ilk of the films I grew up with, films like Deliverance, The Shining, Alien, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Thing. These are all great horror films that have stood the test of time – it’s because they dared to take themselves seriously and it paid off."
More provocative was the idea of having an all-female cast, a strategy that invigorates the mayhem with a uniquely charged set of social dynamics. (As Marshall jokes, his film once again proves that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.)
"A friend of mine offhandedly threw it into the mix before I wrote the first draft of the script," the director explains. "I thought it was a novel and unique idea and very contemporary. No one had ever done an all-female ensemble action horror of this brutal nature, before so I thought, ‘Let’s go for it.’ And it makes sense – within the climbing and caving community, there are a lot of women involved internationally and there’s no reason they shouldn’t be doing a trip like this. But it was important to me that what happens in the film doesn’t happen because they’re women. It happens because they’re friends or because of the catalyst of the crawlers. They just happen to be women and the plot isn’t dependent on that."
Lest Marshall sound like a progressive, sensitive sort, it should also be noted that he concealed the crawlers from his cast until their characters’ first encounter with them on screen so as to get an authentically terrified reaction.
"I took a leaf out of Ridley Scott’s book when he concealed the chestburster from the actors on Alien," says Marshall. "I thought, ‘OK, we’ll just not show them anything. We’ll not let them meet the actors who play the crawlers and we’ll not show them any sketches or designs.’ They weren’t allowed to have any indication of what they’d look like.
"I knew that the first time they’d encounter them was in this scene in the dark. It was a ripe opportunity to have a genuine reaction from the actors. I thought, ‘We’ll sneak the crawler into the shot during the take and the reaction that we get will be real.’ And that’s exactly what we did. When they went off screaming from their first sight of the crawler, that was their real reaction."
He assures me the actors were "thankful" for the experience.
"It built up a palpable tension on set," he says. "They were constantly asking me, ‘What are they gonna look like. You’re gonna put one in a cave with us, aren’t you?’ They were just on edge all the time and I think that really helped." |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.