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The average person is, at the very least, uneasy about the dark. As Stephen King puts it in his non-fiction “Danse Macabre” book, “the dark, it goes almost without saying, provides the basis for our most primordial fears.” Fear of the unknown is one thing, but “The Descent” makes it clear that knowing what’s in the dark doesn’t do anyone any favors, either.
Neil Marshall’s 2005 shriek-fest follows a sextet of women who go spelunking deep in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. As the horror movie algorithm dictates, the women are quickly cut off from civilization when an entrance collapses. Then one of the more zealous adventurers among them admits that she led them into an unknown cave system instead of the well-trodden caves they had originally plotted out, so a timely rescue is not in the cards. With nowhere to go but further down, the group advances beyond the reaches of natural daylight (and seemingly, the secular world), where dying headlamps, glowsticks, and Zippo lighters provide just enough illumination to make everything super-scary. The explorers soon discover that they’ve walked into the wrong room, stumbling onto a feral horde of subterranean humanoids known as “crawlers.” These creatures are vampiric Bad News Bears, taking a bite out of one woman’s throat like a Honey Bun and launching the women into a panic.
The disadvantages are plentiful, as the crawlers not only know the peaks and pits of the underground terrain, but are further blessed with super speed, wall-scaling capabilities, and the ability to echolocate, which makes every sound a potentially deadly one for trespassers. Humans, on the whole, are too loud and clumsy to weather even a brief run-in with the crawlers, making “The Descent” one of the most formidable creature-feature situations of all time.
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