Halloween Week: The Descent (2005)

2 years ago

Halloween Week: The Descent (2005)

A FREUDIAN NIGHTMARE OF BLOODY CAVES

As a lover of everything horror, I have to say this: contemporary horror movies are overwhelmingly misogynist. This isn’t surprising, since the people making and reviewing horror films are primarily men. If you look up almost any horror movie magazine or website, you’ll see that the reviewers and horrorphiles - at least the ones with a platform and a voice - are male. In addition, straight men between 18 and 35 would seem to be the assumed target audience of horror movies, judging by the many hot-chicks-being-tortured movies that have glutted the market lately. If you see an attractive young woman in a mainstream horror movie, you can pretty much guarantee you are going to see her breasts at some point, probably sooner than later, and probably right before she gets killed in some complicated and gruesome manner.

Not so with The Descent, a horror movie filled with ass-kicking adult women with actual characterization and individual personalities (beyond the usual “slutty girl” and “nice girl” cliches you get in horror—guess which kind of girl usually dies first?). This film is overwhelmingly female. Not only is every important cast member female, but the imagery and primary personal conflicts are strictly between women (aside from the universal conflict of being chased by hungry cave creatures in West Virginia, I suppose). The Descent takes every implicit tension in every film about female friendship you’ve ever seen—sexual jealousy, fear and longing for motherhood, desire and suspicion of female friendship—and makes them explicit.

The Descent features six fine actresses as our unfortunate cave spelunkers, and I wish that I had time to expound on the wonderful and foul-mouthed performance of the Irish actress Nora-Jane Noone, but the primary conflict is between Sara (Shauna Macdonald) and Juno (Natalie Mendoza). When the movie begins, Sara has recently lost her husband and daughter in a freak automobile accident (of which she was the only survivor) and is clearly still traumatized from the event—she swallows pills by the handful and suffers from nightmares (and visions) of her daughter. Juno, the most adventurous and athletic of the bunch, invites Sara and a group of friends to explore a cave in West Virginia. It’s hinted that this is Sara’s first major outing since her husband and child were killed. The trip is supposed to bring them all together as they had been before the accident, and Juno seems especially eager to make Sara happy.

As in most good horror, this film is much scarier before you actually see the monsters. The Descent takes advantage of the naturally claustrophic, wet, and alien atmosphere of a cave by almost immediately putting the viewer in darkness and doubt—the cave doesn’t seem to have the dimensions and routes that the women had expected, and Juno doesn’t have a map. After one of the women falls and breaks her leg, they try to find a way out, dragging their injured friend along with them. Six women, one desperately wounded, all trapped in a small, dark space that seems to be crumbling around them is frightening enough. Then, they discover bones, some of them human. And then, the monsters arrive.

As the women crawl through the unlit caves, bloodsoaked and streaked with grime, senses on high alert, they become the most terrifying part of the movie—they are dehumanized in the most basic way, driven down to the level of survival and desperation. Although there are some moments when we cheer the women on in their slicing and dicing of cave creatures, other moments reveal the danger of living on the level of flight-or-fight instincts.

The primary color of The Descent is red, and even before the women plunge into pools of bloody water, the red flares they use to illuminate the caves set the murky and bloody tone. Sara, who has gone through possibly the most horrifying event that any woman (or man) could experience, now seems to be trapped in her own femaleness, crawling around in a Freudian nightmare of bloody caves, pursued by things that she can’t see or understand.

Both Juno and Sara could have been played as types (maybe as variations on the good girl and the whore), but Mendoza and MacDonald avoid these expected characterizations. Though Juno’s motives are mixed, she comes across as generous but impetuous to a fault. She honestly seems to want to please Sara, though she holds a secret that makes Sara her primary rival. Sara’s grief at first gives her a slightly dazed appearance, as though she is viewing everybody else through a haze. When her own survival is threatened, though, the haze clears and she seems to be the only character (aside from Juno), who is determined not to die, no matter what it takes. By the end, it’s hard to know exactly what to think of Sara’s actions and choices—the movie doesn’t let us assign praise or blame.

The cover of my copy of The Descent pictures Sara screaming, emerging from a pool of blood. It’s a birth image, and the film asks us to think about exactly what can be born when we are terrified, alone, and determined to survive.

Letitia Trent is a writer and poet living in Vermont.