The Descent

Warning: spoilers!

Six hardened adventurers and thrill seekers go caving. Except this is no

ordinary cave – it is virgin ground, unnamed and unexplored. Or at least,

no-one has ever survived to name it, or chart its passageways, populated as

they are by a race of humanoid monsters perfectly adapted to the claustrophobic

caverns.

The set up for The Descent is not unlike many horror movies – all the pieces of

the formula are there – dark, scary setting, monsters, a group of foolhardy

explorers venturing into the lion’s den. What is different is that all of these

adventurers are women.

It’s a sad state of affairs perhaps, but this inevitably makes the film about

gender to some extent. And in many ways, it breaks new, welcome ground. There

is no experienced male character to heroically lead the way to safety and fend

of the monsters (in fact the only male actor is shockingly and messily

dispatched very early on). These women don’t need one. And they are real,

rounded characters not cardboard cut outs – perhaps because of the fact they

are women, they are not slotted into the traditional boxes of hero, heroine,

coward, comedian and token minority that usually populate these sorts of films.

But, I feel that this promising beginning is chipped away at until what is

presented is far more ambivalent.

they are real, rounded characters not cardboard cut outs

These women are tough, experienced in everything from base jumping to white

water rafting. It’s clear that they seek to push things to the limit. Girl’s

own adventure stuff. Except this is not that type of film. Instead of an action

movie/romp, this is a hard, gritty subversion of the Indian Jones school (one of

the group on seeing the cave entrance quips ‘I’m not Tombraider’). And the use

of an all-woman cast is, I would argue, an intrinsic part of that.

I was interested to find out this film was directed by Neil Marshall, whose

previous effort, Dog Soldiers, was a low budget werewolf flick. In that film,

an all-male group of soldiers is led to its destruction by a woman who tempts

them into the lair of her werewolf family. And it includes a really terrible

time of the month joke, setting it miles apart from the much more interesting

Ginger Snaps.

Crassly, one of the chapter titles on the DVD edition of Dog Soldiers is ‘All

Women are Bitches’.

they enter into the male territory of the explorer

So perhaps it is not surprising that the women in The Descent get in trouble

because they go a step too far – they enter into the male territory of the

explorer, and, despite a valiant effort, it beats them.

This is a very claustrophobic film. Trapped in tiny spaces, in the looming dark,

even without phosphorous-white, dripping creatures behind every corner, it is

utterly terrifying.

But after the first scare, the women quickly find they are a match for these

creatures. They can bludgeon them to death, and if they can do this often

enough to find the way out they’ll be ok.

This isn’t Buffy though. The sympathetic characters are quickly killed off,

leaving two. Sarah, a mother bled of her humanity by the death of her husband

and child, and Juno – who is uncomfortably wedged into the role of villain,

having got everyone trapped in the first place, slept with Sarah’s husband and

left one of the group to die. It is no co-incidence that she is the most

determined and hard-core daring-do character of them all.

the sympathetic characters are quickly killed off

Horror films usually succeed by establishing a them-versus-us mentality – the

humans band together (with the potential for one or two bad eggs), and are

allowed to kill, maim and slaughter the monsters without compunction because

they really are just that – inhuman, outside of the moral sphere.

But in The Descent, bludgeoning the monsters makes the characters just as

monstrous. Hence the killing is fairly full on – caving in their soft white

sculls, or pushing thumbs through their blind, sticky eye sockets.

The Descent complicates the traditional horror movie set up by showing the

killing in grim, viscous detail. And even more so, through the traumatic effect

it has on the characters. And the capacity for horrendous mistakes when

people/women let themselves loose in bloody mayhem – in one scene, having just

killed a monster, Juno hears a noise behind her. Thinking it’s another monster,

she swings her pick axe around without looking, to find she’s buried it in her

friend’s neck.

The true brutality in the film is what the women are capable of

That’s bad enough but it’s the woman’s failing voice pleading not to be left

alone that creates the real horror in the scene rather than the seeping neck

wound.

The true brutality in the film is not the by-the-numbers scary thing in the

shadows, it’s the horror that these women are capable of, and the effects of

this trauma on them.

And the end of the film bears this out. The sole surviving character seems to

have made it out. Shaking, coated in blood, she scrambles into a waiting car

and drives away. She pulls off the road and vomits. There’s no sense of relief

here – but an uncomfortable realization that it would not be possible to come

out of such an experience with any piece of mind. Except it’s all a

hallucination. She’s really back in the cave, stuck without any hope of escape.

But there’s the true relief – she’s been put through so much, there’s no such

thing as salvation for her. Instead her mind simply snaps and she sits with her

imaginary dead daughter waiting for the light to go out – in reality a signifier

for her death but in her mind the blowing out of birthday candles and the final

wish of her daughter.

the women are stripped of heroism

Unlike the climax to The Thing, and other films which do not let any of their

characters escape – there’s no heroism to this. She’s not saving anyone, quite

the reverse. She dies having taken her revenge on her disloyal friend, hacking

her in the leg so she won’t be able to flee from the monsters – a type of

revenge that would be called ‘below the belt’ if these characters were men.

And that’s the key to why this film is such an ambiguous portrayal of gender – it has been stripped of heroism, and I can’t help but wonder if the all-female

cast was being used by the filmmaker to enact this.

The main character Sarah is put in a typical difficult hero position – forced to

leave her friend behind, with the real possibility the monsters will eat her

alive. There’s no soft focus hand holding as she slips away – Sarah must cave

her head in with the skull of one of the monsters’ former victims.

Because although these are strong women, there are no heroics here – not to say

the women do not put on significant displays of courage, bravery and

perseverance. Instead, most the characters’ strength invokes some of history’s

more misogynistic portrayals of women – they get a Medea-ish, semi-crazy look

in their eyes when they kill.

they get a Medea-ish, semi-crazy look in their eyes when they kill

The cave itself can also be read as indicative of a fear of strong women –

enclosed, damp, and semi-virginal, at one point Sarah plunges into a pool of

blood.

So while these women are no wilting damsels, waiting to be rescued, neither are

they allowed to fill the shoes of men in similar films. What is the message

here, really? That women can be strong and tough and defend themselves. But

also that they don’t pull through. That an adventurous lifestyle leads them to

a sticky end. That maybe they should just stay home. And that Indiana

Jones-style, swashbuckling heroics are not for them.

Jess McCabe also writes for The F Word blog.