More than a full year after it debuted in the United Kingdom in July 2005, the horror movie The Descent touched down across the pond on August 4, 2006. That makes this month the 20th anniversary of American theaters receiving the scariest movie of the 21st century.
In honor of this momentous occasion, let’s break down where the horror genre was at the time, how The Descent shook it all up, and the legacy it enjoys to this day.
The Descent Came at a Transition Point for the Horror Genre
Seminal horror movies were hitting the ground thick and fast in the late 1990s. Heck, 1999 alone saw the debuts of The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense, and Audition.
Perhaps most importantly, 1996’s Scream reinvented the slasher genre with a postmodern twist, leading to a spate of hip teen horror movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty, and Urban Legend. While this burgeoning wave of movies was cut off at the pass by the horrific events at Columbine in 1999, after which point many high school-centric horror movies were heavily retooled, it laid the foundation for a resurgence of interest in classic horror titles.
Even though plenty of legendary classics debuted at the end of the decade, the horror genre struggled to find its identity in a post-Columbine (and eventually a post-9/11) world. The influence of Scream eventually manifested in a glut of remakes of classic horror titles, particularly slashers. The trend kicked off in 2003 with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and although the trend would fully explode in the late 2000s, by the end of 2006, American cinemas had already played the remakes House of Wax, The Fog, The Amityville Horror, Black Xmas, The Hills Have Eyes, The Wicker Man, The Omen, and When a Stranger Calls.
Around this same time, Hollywood began to gobble up IP from overseas as well, churning out remakes of Asian horror titles. J-horror remakes were particularly popular in the wake of the 2002 hit The Ring, and by 2006 we had already received remakes of The Grudge and Dark Water.
‘The Grudge’ (2004)Credit: Columbia Pictures
For some time, the only original horror that was especially successful either came from The Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan (Signs, The Village) or was an early entry in what would later become known as the “torture porn” subgenre (Saw, Hostel). This is the world into which The Descent was about to pop its terrifying head.
The Descent Bridged Horror’s Past and Future
In general, major horror movies of the 2000s were either looking backwards to beloved titles of the past or exploring new directions for the genre to see if they could strike gold. One thing that The Descent (which was written and directed by Dog Soldiers’ Neil Marshall) does with aplomb is to bridge the gap between the past and the future by taking the tropes of past horror outings and converting them into something fresh and exciting, ultimately predicting the shape that horror would take many years down the road.
The tropes that it brought to the table were sharpened into a fine point with which to torture the audience. Do you like jump scares? Here is an assemblage of some of the finest shock gags ever crafted. How about the trope of the final girl? Have an all-female cast of capable spelunkers, any of whom could survive if things go their way. (Spoiler alert: Things almost never go their way.)
The Descent also brings something truly dastardly to the table. The terrifying story of a group of adrenaline-junkie friends being trapped in an underground cave with carnivorous monsters is couched in a different, equally terrifying story. Even if the monsters never appeared to transform the movie into a blood-drenched nightmare, the sheer claustrophobia of the first half of the movie is more than enough to send most viewers into paroxysms of fear.
This emphasizes the impossible position that the characters are in. In the same way that they can’t escape their predicament, audiences can’t escape into a safe harbor. Every layer of the movie feels genuinely dangerous and unsafe, providing the movie with an almost suffocating level of intensity.
‘The Descent’ (2005)Credit: Pathé Distribution
Somehow, even in the midst of delivering convincing monster and blood effects, solid performances, and a chillingly believable series of rocky caverns with seemingly endless drops into pitch-black darkness, The Descent has even more to give. The movie anticipates the “elevated horror” subgenre of the mid-2010s and beyond with a potent story about the protagonist, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), grappling with the sudden death of her husband and daughter. So in addition to the non-stop terror of the setting, audiences are forced through a harrowing story that plays the heartstrings like a harp.
Living in a Post-Descent World
Although there are plenty of terrifying movies that have come out between 2006 and now ([REC], Paranormal Activity, The Conjuring, The Babadook), none of them have been able to match The Descent in terms of pound-for-pound delivery of fright combined with pure pathos, putting you inescapably into the characters’ shoes.
This probably explains why The Descent has enjoyed a towering reputation since its debut. Although it wasn’t an immediate smash in the United States (it earned $26 million in 2006, which isn’t bad, but made it the 106th highest-grossing domestic release of the year, behind titles including The Ant Bully, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, and The Grudge 2), it has accumulated more and more of a reputation in the ensuing 20 years.
In 2005, it tied for No. 6 on Sight and Sound’s list of the best movies of the year, of any genre (which also included titles like Brokeback Mountain, Mysterious Skin, and Howl’s Moving Castle), before going on to top the list of Bravo's 13 Even Scarier Movie Moments (beating scenes from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Zodiac, and The Strangers) and appear on Time Out’s list of the best horror movies of all time, Rolling Stone’s list of the greatest horror films of the 21st century, and many more.
So where do you think The Descent stands among the canon of great horror films of the 21st century, and do you plan to give it a rewatch for its 20th anniversary? Sound off in the comments below!
