The Descent (film)

If you look at the Light in the top left corner the right way, you can see a Crawler's Face.

The Descent is a 2005 British horror film written and directed by Neil Marshall, director of Dog Soldiers and Doomsday. The film follows a group of six women who embark on a caving expedition and become trapped underground after a cave-in. Things go from bad to worse when they discover that the cave is home to predatory, humanoid creatures (known as "Crawlers"). As the Crawlers hunt them down, the girls embark on a struggle to survive and escape the cave - but that's not their only problem, as the friends' trust in each other slowly begins to deteriorate in the tense, claustrophobic environment. A sequel, The Descent Part 2, was released in December 2009.

Has nothing to do with the video game series Descent. Nor the novel The Descent by Jeff Long, although there are certainly similarities.

Was released almost simultaneously with two nigh-identical films; The Cave and The Cavern.

Tropes used in The Descent include:

• Abandoned Hospital Awakening: Subverted, when Sarah seems to wake up in an Abandoned Hospital after the car accident. After about twenty seconds, it turns out to be a hallucination, she's in a normal hospital.
• Action Girl: Everyone.
• Ankle Drag: Happens to Becca as she's taken away by a Crawler.
• Ax Crazy: Sarah.
• Badass: Almost everyone has their moments, but Juno and Sarah especially apply for this trope.
• The Bechdel Test: With a cast of almost only women, there is almost no mention of men or their love lives except for an offhand reference by Sam of her boyfriend, and Sarah finding out Juno was having an affair with her late-husband.
• Better to Die Than Be Killed: Beth begs Sarah to kill her, rather than leave her to die slowly from her neck wound, or end up as food for the Crawlers.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Sarah.
• Big Sister Instinct: Becca is very caring and protective towards her sweet little sister Sam, and to a lesser extent, the rest of the less-experienced caving group. Also, it's fairly subtle, but Beth displays Big Sister Instincts towards anyone in the group who needs it - she's constantly looking after the emotionally fragile (due to the death of her husband and child) Sarah, she gives her jacket to Holly after she breaks her leg and helps her stand and walk (along with Sam) and she goes back to help Juno in the crawler fight.
• California Doubling: Set in America (aside from the beginning of the movie), filmed in England and Scotland.
• Cerebus Callback: The group picture the girls take of themselves the morning of the caving trip shows up at the end with the credits rolling over it.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Juno's necklace. Also, Sam's watch.
  • Also the climbing picks. In Real Life, those are only used to climb frozen waterfalls, but they're necessary to the movie as weapons.
  • Averted, however, with the massive drill that Becca has attached to her belt (most prominently seen during the scene where she crosses the crevasse). This is pointed out in the director and cast commentary.
• Chekhov's Skill: A rather odd aversion. Extreme-sports expert Becca is able, with a great amount of difficulty, to climb across the roof of a cavern using a long rope and several carabiners. This is set-up for later when the much less experienced Sam has to do it with about three feet of rope and one carabiner. Realistically, she can't, and then a crawler comes.
• Covers Always Lie: One version of the cover is a fan servicey pose of all girls forming a skull while wearing tight revealing outfits, (an ode to Salvador Dali's Skull Women.) Most of the girls were wandering in the dark covered in blood and wearing full protective gear, anyone expecting hawtness to occur would be mildly disappointed.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Poor Becca arguably recieves the slowest, most painful death in the film (not counting Beth, who was grievously wounded and left in agony until she gets mercy-killed) - a Crawler rips open her stomach and starts devouring her innards while she is still alive. Ouch.
• Cruel Twist Ending: The UK Ending. Sarah merely hallucinated escaping the cave; there is no exit. All along the characters have only been descending further down, without any way out. Waking up right where she lost consciousness, Sarah goes on to imagine her dead daughter sitting in front of her with a birthday cake, as the crawlers are homing in on Sarah to eat her alive.
• Danger Takes a Backseat: Sort of. More like Danger Takes A Passenger Seat. (Although this moment turns out to be one of Sarah's hallucinations.)
• Dead Little Sister: Sarah becomes depressed and withdrawn after losing her husband and daughter in a car accident. The fact that she's already emotionally fragile may have contributed to her later axe-craziness.
• Death By Pragmatism: Justified with Juno. She was murdered after she accidentally fatally wounded Beth and then ran away. Sarah found out, but she didn't know it was an accident...
• Developing Doomed Characters: Pulled off successfully. The crawlers don't arrive until halfway through the film, but most critics appreciated that because the time was spent character building and establishing the decaying trust within the group and sense of claustrophobia. Some even complained that the crawlers showed up at all to interrupt the caving drama.
• Downer Ending:
  • The original UK ending: Everyone dies. Sarah cripples Juno and leaves her for the crawlers, then imagines escaping. She wakes up, hallucinates that her daughter is there, and gives up to stay with the hallucination.
  • The US ending: After killing Juno, Sarah really does escape, and hallucinates Juno's creepy looking ghost is there with her. She's an Ax Crazy murderer, her family and friends are all dead, and there are still strong implications that she's just imagining this and is still in the cave. Considering they changed the ending because it was too bleak, there isn't that much of a difference.
• Dramatic Necklace Removal: Happens after Juno accidentally pickaxes Beth through the throat - as she collapses, Beth rips Juno's necklace from her.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: Sam gets her throat slashed by a Crawler. Just before she dies, however, she gets a sudden burst of adrenaline and stabs the Crawler, causing it to plummet into the crevasse below. As it turns out, there was water below and the Crawler doesn't actually die at that point (Juno finishes the job), but it still counts as a seriously Badass moment for Sam.
• Dwindling Party
• Enforced Method Acting: Intended, atleast. Neil Marshall attempted this by not letting the main cast see the crawlers until they were revealed on camera. However, it backfired when they got such a fright they all ran away for real, out of the shot and across the set. Even long after the first encounter the actresses hated being around the crawlers in costume.
• Eye Scream: Between this and 28 Days Later, killing an enemy by pushing its eyes in with your thumbs has apparently become the British horror symbol for "I've turned psychopathic and metaphorically become one of the monsters."
  • Earlier, Sarah takes out the female Crawler by stabbing her in the eye with a sharp piece of bone.
• Face Revealing Turn: One of Sarah's nightmares has her daughter being seen from behind, who suddenly turns around to reveal the face of a Crawler.
• Fake Nationality: Juno, who is American, is played by Natalie Mendoza, who is Australian-British. Sam, who is Dutch, is played by Myanna Buring, who is Swedish.
• Fan Disservice: Sarah spends a good deal of the last part of the film in her tight vest top after shedding her other layers, and covered in sweat. She also happens to be covered in blood from head to foot. (Others may see this as Fan Service, if you're into that kind of thing...)
• Final Girl: Until the sequel changed the canon, Sarah made herself into the Final Girl. And then died, as a consequence of not having Juno around to help her, snap her out of her crazy hallucinating reverie, or rage-fuel her badassery and survival instincts. Oops.
• Freak-Out:
  • Happens to Sarah twice: first time is when she loses her husband and daughter in a horrific car accident one year prior to the caving trip, and the second is when she completely snaps after being attacked by the Crawlers, being forced to watch said Crawlers partially devour the corpse of Holly directly in front of her, and then granting Beth's I Cannot Self-Terminate request by bashing her head in with a rock. Then there's the small fact that she mistakenly believes that Juno deliberately stabbed Beth through the throat...
  • Following Sarah's claims (initially dismissed as hallucinations by the rest of the group) that she saw "a man", Becca has a smaller-scale Freak-Out when the girls stumble across the Crawlers' feeding ground, declaring "Oh, fuck it!" and hysterically screaming out for help on the off-chance that someone else may be down there to help them.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • One of the first sightings of a Crawler is right after the tunnel collapse, on a ledge when Sarah is sweeping the cave with her flashlight. It's visible for barely one second.
  • The very first sighting of a Crawler can be seen very, very briefly in the scene where Juno lights up a flare for the first time and throws it into the middle of the cave. It is very difficult to spot without pausing and looking closely. According to Neil Marshall, this is actually a continuity error - the Crawler is one of the film crew. When this mistake was spotted, rather than remove it digitally, the crewmember's face was deliberately whitened to bring it out more, thus making him look like a hiding Crawler.
    • In the same scene, a Crawler can be seen to the left-hand side of the screen when Sarah is looking around for a few seconds.
• Freud Was Right: As is jokingly (or perhaps not) stated in the director and cast commentary on the DVD, several people have believed that this movie is all about sex, what with the little white men chasing sweaty women down dripping wet tunnels...
  • Invoked by Neil Marshall on the DVD "Beneath the Scenes", where multiple jokes are made about how similar a piece of the cave is to a certain part of the female anatomy. To wit - "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!"
• Genre Shift: From Primal Fear to Slasher Movie.
• Gorn: It's not excessive, but is definitely present in a few scenes.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Happens when Paul and Jessica are killed. We see a pole emerge from the back of Paul's headrest complete with blood splatter, and Jessica's death isn't shown at all - the only indication of her death is her blood seeping out from under the car.
• Heroic BSOD: A deleted scene has Becca go through this after seeing her sister get killed by a crawler, desperately shrieking out that every step further down these caves is another step closer to hell.
• Hot Teacher: Beth, the English teacher, who also manages to use her knowledge to recognize cave paintings.
• A House Divided: The whole group is somewhat mad at Juno for lying to them and bringing them down to an unexplored cave that was much more dangerous than they were expecting. However, it's water under the bridge once they meet the crawlers. That is, until Sarah finds out what Juno did to Beth, and she doesn't know it was an accident, plus a recent discovery of Juno's extracurricular activities with her husband, and she's also feeling a bit Ax Crazy... The result is not pretty.
• Howl of Sorrow: Sarah, after she has well and truly lost it.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Beth, after being accidentally stabbed through the throat by Juno, begs Sarah to kill her, lest she die slowly and painfully or be ripped apart by the Crawlers.
• Idiot Ball: Subverted. Almost every named character makes at least one mistake leading to their own death or someone else's. Usually, it's only one mistake, and it's pretty believable given circumstances. The only named character who doesn't do this is Jessica, Sarah's daughter.
• Hot Mom: Sarah.
• I'm a Humanitarian: The Crawlers could technically be considered cannibals, as they are, according to Neil Marshall, evolved cavemen. There are several hints of this throughout the film.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Both Paul and Jessica get this courtesy of some poorly-tied-down metal poles at the beginning of the movie. Later, Sarah has a nightmare in which a metal pole suddenly flies through the cabin window and through her head.
• Infant Immortality: Brutally averted near the beginning of the movie. Also, the death of the child Crawler may also count.
• It Gets Worse: And it never really stops.
• Jump Scare:
  • Starting with the birds and going on from there.
  • There's an even earlier one when Sarah has her nightmare in the cabin.
• Kill the Cutie: Sam.
• Kill'Em All:
  • Everyone who gets a speaking part dies, two of them within the first five minutes. To be fair, there are only eight people in the whole cast. Playing people, at least.
  • That is, until the sequel changed this. Sarah gets it together enough to stagger out of an entrance to the cave, albeit with amnesia about the last two days.
• Left for Dead: Beth and Juno.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: Subverted, as it's not intentional and done in a moment of panic. Later averted, as everyone gets back together at some point, though not all at once.
• Mama Bear: The first female Crawler seen in the film appears shortly after Sarah kills the Crawler's child. Upon learning that her child is dead (after a surprisingly sad moment of the Crawler desperately and pitifully nudging the body), she immediately goes berserk.
• Matchlight Danger Revelation: It is only when the night vision on Holly's camcorder is switched on that a Crawler is seen up close for the first time.
• The Medic: Sam, who is a med student. Because of this, she can help treat injuries the best she can, and also examine the crawler's biology and try to recognize how they function.
• Mercy Kill: Sarah does this to Beth, after the latter begged to be killed.
• The Mistress: Juno is deeply implied to have been having an affair with Sarah's husband. When Beth handed Sarah Juno's necklace she whispers that is was from him, as it has his personal motto engraved in it.
• Mood Whiplash: The opening. It goes from Sarah, Juno and Beth white water rafting and having a great time, to less uplifting when Sarah wondering why her husband is acting oddly, to downright horrific when the car crash happens.
• Morlocks: The crawlers.
• Ms. Fanservice: Juno spends most of the film in a tight red climbing top, unzipped to reveal a hint of cleavage, and still looks hot when covered in sweat, dirt and blood. Being played by Natalie Mendoza helps.
• Neck Snap: Juno does this to a Crawler.
• Nightmare Sequence: Sarah has a lot of them.
• Not Quite Dead: Beth.
• Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here: Holly is annoyed that Juno is taking them to Borham Caverns, a cave system for tourists, as she believes it will be boring. It later turns out that Juno deliberately led them to an unknown cave system instead.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • For some of the jump scares, it's fairly easy to tell that something bad is going happen soon. We don't know what, where or exactly when, so being somewhat forewarned only makes it that much more frightening.
  • For the first 2/3 of the film, pretty much nothing does happen, instead relying on the atmosphere of the cave itself to create the sense of dread. For this reason, many find this actually scarier than the Crawlers.
• Oh Crap:
  • The facial expression isn't seen, but the tone of voice says it all: "Dead animals! Hundreds of them!"
  • Earlier, there's the looks on Sarah and Beth's faces when the cave tunnel starts to collapse.

Beth: Okay, fuck the rope bag. Move! Move! MOVE!!

• Puppy Dog Eyes: Holly achieves this shortly before she falls down a pit and breaks her leg.
• Redemption Equals Death
• Rock Bottom: After Sarah gets stuck in a tight passage, Beth tries to calm her down, saying that the worst thing that has happened to Sarah has already happened, and generally implies that nothing bad is going to happen again. Naturally, it gets worse. Much worse.
• Rule of Symbolism: When Sarah unleashes her Howl of Sorrow, the action cuts back to Juno, Becca and Sam, who hear a Crawler scream. The sounds are edited so it sounds as though Sarah's scream has suddenly changed into that of one of the Crawlers'. Later (in the original UK ending, anyway), Sarah rises from the floor of the cave in a manner very reminiscent of the way a Crawler would move.
• Scenery Porn:
  • The shots of the river during the prologue, the shots of the Appalachian Mountains, and the first cave chamber.
  • Scenery Gorn: The Crawlers' chambers.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: One of the first characters to go is Holly, the crazy awesome chick.
• Shout-Out:
  • "I'm an English teacher, not fucking Tomb Raider."
  • The music in the scene where Juno and Sarah move through the caverns by flare light bears unmistakable resemblance to Morricone's theme from The Thing.
  • The scene where the team climbs the rockface into the feeding chamber is an almost shot for shot replication of the scene in Alien where Lambert and Kane climb up to meet the Space Jockey.
• Shown Their Work / Viewers Are Geniuses: Extremely subtle cues exist to foreshadow plot points.
  • The first crawlspace is clearly limestone, notoriously treacherous for cave-ins if not reinforced by more stable minerals. Given the close proximity to a riverbed, it's not unreasonable to assume it's just a thin coating... in a level 2 cave.
  • The Crawlers have the auditory Shout-Out to the Predator series. They're similar to the clicks dolphins make, and are a very early tip-off that they use sonar.
  • Also noteworthy how no one stops to exposit on how various caving techniques work, e.g. the use of a lighter to find air currents.
• Team Mom: While Juno leads the group, it's Becca who reassures them and makes sure they're doing everything safely.
• Tears of Blood: Near the end of the film, when Sarah hallucinates the presence of Juno's ghost, the latter has blood seeping from her eyes.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: Since Sarah was hallucinating without a doubt at several separate points, there is a popular theory that the cave monsters were all in her mind and it was her that killed all her friends. The director originally put a crawler silhouette into the first hallucination sequence (which took place outside the cave) but had it edited out because he wanted to leave it more ambiguous.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Beth walks very slowly up to within arm's reach of an ice-pick wielding Juno, and chooses never to say or do anything to announce her presence. Juno mistakes her for a crawler and puts the pick through her neck.
  • Holly. Yes, run ahead of your fellow spelunkers in an unknown cave system! And you're surprised you fell in a hole?!
  • Tropes Are Not Bad, however, and Beth is very likely in shock, and Holly was already well-established as a reckless sort.
• Took a Level in Badass: Sarah, after the events in the cave cause her to snap.
• Too Soon: The 2005 Underground bombings in London threatened to delay the film's British release, for fear that this trope would keep people away from a film about death below ground. Eventually the film was released on schedule, but posters of a lone woman trapped and screaming in the dark were replaced by new ones of all six women standing united against it.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Holly. Though as everybody dies, it's more like Vasquez dies first.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Happens towards the end when Sarah unwinds the car window to vomit on the road.
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: The Rock Bottom example above, and also Juno's comment about how the girls needn't worry about getting lost because she (Juno) has "never been lost in (her) life".