Horror Fest Day Two: The Descent

I'm going to be quick about this, because we're about to start Planet Terror, but The Descent was a nice change of pace after Return to Horror High.

After watching that absolute garbage, Neil Marshall's tale of spelunking gone horribly awry would've seemed great even if it wasn't. Fortunately, The Descent is even better the more times you watch it. We finally registered our first legit "jump" scare about halfway in, but the monster reveals aren't necessarily effective if the first part in the caves doesn't work.

Marshall really plays into every claustrophobic fear a person could have setting up The Descent, and those sequences in the cave work like gangbusters. The cave-in, the tight quarters, the impossibly close camera work; everything serves the purpose of making that cave as impossibly scary as it can be, THEN the fucking bat monsters arrive. And since he uses them sparingly at first, they're pretty freaky.

But what I like about The Descent isn't just the cave, or the monsters even, but the fact that the characters have relationships with each other that don't break down into stupid bickering or are dropped when it's inconvenient. Oh, and that ending.... Remember how I said 1408 had an appropriate, albeit dark ending? Well, The Descent's ending is pitch perfect, and literally and figuratively dark.

Okay, time to lighten the atmosphere with half of Grindhouse. Be back in a bit...