"Six women go spelunking" doesn't necessarily read as a great logline for a horror movie, but Neil Marshall's "The Descent" takes that premise and crafts an unforgettable exercise in terror. As the saying goes, it's a B-movie with A+ filmmaking.
Being trapped underground combines two common fears, confinement and darkness, and in "The Descent," the heavy shadows only reinforce the claustrophobia. Marshall and his cinematographer Sam McCurdy chose to light the film's sets (a facsimile of a real cave system built and shot at Pinewood Studios) primarily with the characters' flashlights. Even color choices — some frames are filtered entirely red or green — are used diegetically from those lights or flares.
As the characters get deeper and deeper into the cave, darkness subsumes each and every frame. It needs to, for the whole reason a cave is a scary setting is because of what you can't see. And yet, Marshall...
Being trapped underground combines two common fears, confinement and darkness, and in "The Descent," the heavy shadows only reinforce the claustrophobia. Marshall and his cinematographer Sam McCurdy chose to light the film's sets (a facsimile of a real cave system built and shot at Pinewood Studios) primarily with the characters' flashlights. Even color choices — some frames are filtered entirely red or green — are used diegetically from those lights or flares.
As the characters get deeper and deeper into the cave, darkness subsumes each and every frame. It needs to, for the whole reason a cave is a scary setting is because of what you can't see. And yet, Marshall...
- 12/4/2023
- by Devin Meenan
- Slash Film
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