Rarely has a horror movie been as precisely calibrated to tap into as many universal fears as The Descent, which hit American theaters 20 years ago today. Writer-director Neil Marshall’s film, about six adventurers who find themselves lost in an uncharted cave network in North Carolina, unfolds as a relentless onslaught of phobias — of claustrophobia-inducing spaces, of the dark, of being adrift in unfamiliar terrain, of being trapped, of being hunted. “I very specifically set out to make the scariest movie I could,” said Marshall in an interview. “There was malicious intent on my part, I wanted to scare the s*** out of people.”
The ordeal is set into motion with a single lie. Having arranged for five of her friends to join her on a spelunking trip in the Appalachian Mountains, the authoritative and reckless Juno (Natalie Mendoza) doesn’t lead them to the popular tourist spot she’d promised, but into a subterranean system, where her appetite for risk and her ambition to be the first to map the network have overridden any common sense. Juno’s forced to come clean after a cave-in blocks the path back to the surface and she can no longer feign knowledge of how to proceed. Now stuck and unmoored, and knowing that any rescuers would be looking for them at the site where they were originally meant to be, the women have no choice but to keep squeezing deeper into the tight tunnels, hoping to find an alternative exit.
