Michael Cusumano here to discuss the movie scene that scared me more than any other in my adult life.
There are some tried and true rules of horror filmmaking that get trotted out whenever the topic is discussed. There is The Hitchcock Rule about the difference between suspense and surprise, and The Jaws Rule about withholding the monster from view until absolutely necessary. I propose adding a new rule to the list of horror maxims: The Descent Rule, named after Neil Marshall’s 2005 terrifying excursion into the caves of Appalachia: Structure your story so that it’s scary even if the main threat never arrived.
Scene: The Tunnel
The Descent didn’t invent this principle, of course...
You can find it well-observed in films like Psycho where the air of guilty paranoia is suffocating long before Marion Crane checks into the Bates Motel, or The Shining where the isolation would be chilling even if the Overlook never revealed its haunted past. But I can’t think of a film that applies it to better effect than The Descent. The initial spelunking trip gone horrifically wrong is so involving that audiences can full-on forget that they bought a ticket to a creature feature.
There is a scene in this opening act that so worked on me, I can summon the fear I felt back in the Summer 2006 if I think about it hard enough, even if I’m sitting on the grass in the park on a sunny day. I refer to the panic attack-inducing scene where our protagonist finds herself stuck while attempting to crawl through a narrow tunnel. I didn't consider myself claustrophobic before The Descent, and I’ll never be sure if this scene awakened a latent fear, or if it’s so viscerally upsetting that it instilled a phobia where none existed.
Any scene where a character gets trapped in a coffin-sized crevice in the bowels of North Carolina is going to be scary, but Marshall’s screenplay just piles on the exacerbating problems mercilessly. It’s a masterpiece of escalation, as much a triumph of screenwriting as editing and cinematography (Not to mention production design. Those ain’t real caves folks!). We’ve already noted that our hero, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), seems too fragile for this cave-diving expedition, both physically, in the sense that she isn’t on the same level as the the more athletic thrill-seekers in the group, and emotionally, in that she hasn’t recovered from the trauma of her husband's death by car accident.
On top of that there is the fact that the whole expedition feels wrong from the start. The trip is supposed to be a controlled risk, akin to skydiving, through caves that have already been mapped and guaranteed safe. But one look at the gaping maw through which they enter the earth lets you know that something is off. We soon learn of course, that these are actually uncharted tunnels, but not before that false sense of security sends these women to their potential destruction.
So the tension is already ratcheted tight by the time we get the reveal of the tunnel. I can still recall my gobsmacked disbelief back in 2006. “Are you ladies sure that’s the only way through,” I asked the screen. “Do you maybe want to keep looking or perhaps turn around and go back? Maybe if you all stand on each other’s shoulders you can climb out the way you came in?” Anything but that tunnel.
But of course, to our cringing horror, the women attempt to wiggle through, and from there it’s a competition to see which detail is the most squirm-inducing. Is it the fact that Sarah is the last one through so no one can crawl in behind her to help? Or is it the terribly awkward position she manages to twist herself into, so we can’t even picture how she would begin to extricate herself?
Who am I kidding, it’s the panic. The panic is the worst part. Sarah’s gasping and whimpering is so horribly relatable. Good god, give me hand-to-hand combat with the blind albino ghoulies any day.
I can think of another good rule to extract from The Descent: don’t belabor your metaphors. Marshall’s film pitches them just right. From the potent birth imagery of tunnels and blood, to the whole situation as extended metaphor for the grieving process. it’s all there on the screen for you to sort through. After the film, of course, when you’re not busy being terrorized.
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