Into Darkness: ‘The Descent’
“Down there, it’s pitch black”
What is darkness? Is it the unknown we fear? Is it the subconscious where we dump our intrusive and abhorrent thoughts we can’t tame or take hold of? Whatever it may be, one thing is certain: it’s where the monsters live — real and imagined. Beasts that conceive like nightmares do, from horrific visions, flashes of fear, and bedrocks of barbarism. Though we can’t see them, we hear their far-reaching shrieks, smell their putrid flesh as it penetrates our nasal cavities, and sense their shadows growing above us before we can see them coming. Little devils, crawling under the surface of the earth, of the mind. They are the opposite of us: inhuman, animalistic, ferocious creatures.
After numerous watches, that’s what The Descent still feels like. In Neil Marshall’s 2005 horror masterpiece, darkness emerges as a living organism. It shifts and lurks and claws its way into our nerves, under our skin, and eventually, inside our heads.
The Descent starts out as a standard trip-to-nature-gone-wrong monster flick but slowly evolves into an elemental, scuzzy hellscape fused with a lamentation on grief, betrayal, and loss. From tiny seeds of conflicts, it blossoms into a visceral, trauma-infested swamp ready to devour our flesh and soul literally and figuratively.
