Going on THE DESCENT With Director Neil Marshall 
REPORTED BY Joseph B. Mauceri

“When the light of day is turned off for five and a half million years, creatures trapped in perpetual darkness must learn to navigate without seeing, to live in an atmosphere that could kill outsiders and to make do without the solar energy that sustains the food chain elsewhere.” - Malcolm W. Brown, Science correspondent, The New York Times, December 12, 1995

One year after a tragic accident, six girlfriends meet in a remote part of the Appalachians for their annual extreme outdoor adventure, in this case the exploration of a cave hidden deep in the woods. Far below the surface of the earth, disaster strikes, and there’s no way out. However, there is something else lurking under the earth. As the friends realize they are now prey, their primal instincts surface in an all-out war against an unspeakable horror, the “crawlers.” The attacks come without warning, increasing in intensity, pushing them beyond on the boundaries of their humanity.<

Neil Marshall's first feature, “Dog Soldiers,” had a booming UK release through Pathé in 2002. It gained a reputation as a cult horror and amassed a large fan base. Written, directed and edited by Marshall, “Dog Soldiers” went on to win numerous international awards, topped the UK DVD and video charts for weeks, and saw Marshall credited as having sparked a revival in British horror. Director Neil Marshall’s THE DESCENT is savagely chilling and will leave you afraid of the dark for days afterwards! We recently spoke with the director about his terrifying tale of primal horror.

W.O.F.: THE DESCENT is a great film. I’m surprised it took so long to get from the U.K. to the States.

NEIL MARSHALL: That’s a funny thing. In the U.K. we rushed it through. We finished filming in February and we had it in the cinemas by July. The reason for that was that the distributor in the U.K. wanted to try and beat “The Cave.” We knew “the Cave” was coming. That was fine and we were able to do that. In the U.S. we couldn’t do that. Lionsgate wanted to but a bit of distance between that film and us. That’s why they waited to until August of this year.

W.O.F.: I’m a big fan of your other film, “Dog Soldiers,” and I really enjoyed this film. So, given the nightmarish situation these characters find themselves in would I by pushing things by thinking that maybe in the back of you mind as you were writing this you were thinking about things like Plato’s “The Cave.”

NEIL MARSHALL: I thinking you’re reaching too deep there. (laughs) There were all sorts of themes going through my head as I was writing it. The cave kind of became this “Apocalypse Now.” They were going up river, but we were going down a cave. Then somebody said to me that we had written a horror porn movie because it was all about this dark slimy tunnel, little white guys chasing these women around, and we had this carven filled with blood they called the “menstrual cave.” I was jus like, “Okay…(laughs) what’s a whole other way you could think about it.” I was just trying to do this story about a person descent into savagery and madness. All these other things were kind of going on around it. I think “the cave” being so connected to humanity and our past, when we used to live in caves, that it is such a symbolic thing that it is open to so many interpretations.

W.O.F.: True, and when you juxtapose the evolution of these characters before and after it also has that feel of “The Lord of the Flies.”

NEIL MARSHALL: Oh yeah!

W.O.F.: The creatures then become a catalyst to bring that about.

NEIL MARSHALL: Totally! That’s absolutely what the creatures are, purely a catalyst to trigger those events. They more like a background element more than anything else. So much of what happens in the film transpires despite the creatures. Also, it’s not like the creatures are the ultimate threat. One thing that we joked about on set when we were filming was that this wasn’t a film about six girls getting attacked by these hideous mutants, this is a film about this nice family of mutants getting being brutally attacked by these six girls. They kill more crawlers then the other way around. (laughs) It was interesting just playing with that whole concept.

W.O.F.: I grew up going to my local cinema and watching the classic Universal monster movies and all the British imports, like the Hammer horror films and “Tales From the Crypt” or “Asylum.” You’ve done a werewolf and a slimy creature film, what’s your indoctrination into the horror genre? What’s your take on creatures and are there more monster movies in your future?

NEIL MARSHALL: I really want to deal with different things all the time. I think my first film being a werewolf movie was symptomatic of the fact that the earliest monster film I can remember seeing were The Universal classics of “Frankenstein: and “The Wolfman.” I was really hooked on those when I was about five or six years old. My dad would let me stay up late and watch them on television. When the video age dawned in the early 80’s the first films I saw were “An American Werewolf in London” and “The Howling,” amongst other things as well. They’re the ones that kind of stuck with me. After seeing those there just wasn’t another werewolf movie that came close. I always think about them together, but the “The Howling” had the better werewolf and “American Werewolf” is a better movie, and had the better transformation scene. Then it turned into a dog and that wasn’t very good! (laughs) I had this idea for a werewolf and I want to run with that and try to make a film with that werewolf. I also wasn’t interested in telling the classic story of “the curse of the werewolf.” It’s been done to death and I just wanted them to be like simply an entity, like in “Aliens, these beings that attack you and you can’t kill them, and all that kind of stuff. That was the route I went down with that film.

I love all cinema, so in “Dog Soldiers,” even in the score, there are references to westerns and war movies. THE DESCENT, I wanted to do another monster movie. I’d done one of the classics, the werewolf, and I have no desire to do a vampire movie. I have no problem watching them, but there are just so many of them out there that the market does not need another vampire movie. And zombie movies… at the time there weren’t many around but I knew that they were kind of on the way. I wasn’t so thrill about that. I thought I should try and come up with a new concept for THE DESCENT. So I came up with the crawlers. I was trying to come up with a new name for them and that was the trickiest part.

Next time around, I don’t know. I want to do a zombie movie, but I’m going to wait a while. I’ve got a zombie movie written and that’s the one I’m going to do. I’d love to do a slasher movie, and I’d love to do a ghost story. I want to explore all the different facets of horror and not just do the same thing again and again. I’ve done two monster movies now and I want the next film I do to not have any monsters in it at all. Take a total break.

W.O.F.: I was recently listening t a commentary and someone was talking about superheroes and mentioned that female action heroes often don’t find an audience, the exception being “Alien.” When you set out to do a film with an all female cast did anyone suggest that you might be crazy and taking a big gamble, regardless of it being a monster movie?

NEIL MARSHALL: Luckily no one mentioned that at all. It is significant that when they compare the women in this film they always bring up Ripley. It’s significant in that she is not the obvious comparison, it’s that she is the only comparison. How many other really three-dimensional, strong, independent, and very realistic women are there in this kind of movie? They’re always superheroes or screaming bimbos. There is something about them that makes them not just regular women. Where as Ripley comes across as being a regular person caught in an extraordinary circumstance, starting with the first film. That was always my intention with this film and no one had a problem with it, because the film doesn’t hinge upon the fact that they’re women. It’s not about that. They just are. Most people just accept it at face value. That’s been really rewarding for me because that’s what I set out to achieve. Guys will just watch it and it’s something doesn’t even occur to them until the end of the film, “Oh hell, that was just women.” They just accept them, other than the fact that they’re six gorgeous women. (laughs) It’s not much of an acceptance.

W.O.F.: I’ve talked to a lot of writers and there seems to be three types of influences that inspire them to write a tale: Something that they read in the newspaper; It’s a kernel of an idea that just blossoms out of a conversation; or a deep-seated from childhood memories. Where to you find most of your inspirations coming from?

NEIL MARSHALL: Certainly experiences as a child. I was taken on a school trip down a mine. I can remember when it was or how old I was. We got all the way down there and they made us turn our torches off. It was the first time in my life I experienced pitch-black. Then they said, “Please don’t wander off because there is a 200-foot shear drop right over there!” You’re just so petrified. We turn our torches back on and went running and screaming out of the cave. That really stuck with me as something that this is a great kind of environment for a story. Your imagination runs wild with this kind of stuff. I’ve never done caving, but I’ve seen books and been aware of it. I thought that it looked a bit much. It was a combination that all these pieces just ended up in the same basket and you take a story from there. I don’t think there was anything specifically in the news, but sometimes ideas do come from bizarre sources.

I end up listening to lots of music when I’m writing, and the music inspires me hugely. In the case of THE DESCENT the one I was listening to most was the score for Chris Nolan’s “Insomnia.” It’s a really bleak score. By weird turn of events, we ended up getting the same guy, David Julyan.

W.O.F.: As you design you creatures, do you ever reach a point where who you might be able to get influences you or do you just go all out and worry about what you can pull off later on in pre-production? Did the end up exactly as you envisioned them?

NEIL MARSHALL: In retrospect, I possibly would have changed certain things about their look, but on the whole they came out pretty much as I had hoped. First of all, I had to come up with the logic and science behind them. The crawlers are an offshoot of the human race, they’re the cavemen who stayed in the cave kind of thing. I was thinking about what would have happened to us if we had been forced to live underground and evolved. What would our skin look like? Would we have lost our sight and would our hearing have developed into like a bat’s sonar? Would we have become adapt at climbing? I was thing about all these sorts of things in terms of what they would need to be able to do so what should they look like in order to do that? I also decided that it’s far scarier the more human they are than… I wanted to rein them in instead of going really outlandish. So I really I just wanted a bunch of guys who had the right physicality and just put the prosthetics on their faces. I didn’t want prosthetics anywhere else. The rest is all just body paint and things like that, and lots of KY Jelly. (laughs) And I created them that way. Plus I made it a point to put physical actors in the roles. Guys that I knew who were a theater company to play the parts. I knew they could interact with each other and they would rehearse. They came up with all these great questions about how crawlers would go about bringing somebody down and killing them. It was great fun researching all of that.

W.O.F.: When you take into consideration the current state of affairs our world is in, do you ever think about what you need to do or how you might need to change things in order to really scare an audience? Is it harder?

NEIL MARSHALL: It is harder! It’s not something that I do consciously. I have my own agenda and I really wanted to push the envelope with this film. At the time, when I was making it, things like “Hostel” and “The Hills Have Eyes” remake weren’t on the radar. Nothing else was really being made that was violent and bloody. I thought, “this was the route I wanted to go down with this film and it fits with what is going on in it.” It was also a desire… when I made “Dog Soldiers” it only ended up getting a 15 Certificate in the U.K., I don’t know what that equivalent is in the U.S. I was really disappointed by that. For me a real horror film should be an 18 or an NC-17. With THE DESCENT I didn’t want to take anymore chances with this and I wanted to go all out and put as much gratuitous violence in it as possible in order to get that rating. That was my reaction to the amount of 15 Certificate horror films or PG-13 horror films that were coming out. Those aren’t horror films, I grew up with X Certificate horror films and that’s what I wanted to see again, I wanted to make a film for adults!

W.O.F.: I had several friends who already had THE DESCENT on DVD. After I saw the film they told me that the U.S. ending was different from the U.K. ending and they gave it to me so I could watch it. It’s a subtle change. In retrospect, I think the U.K. ending is extremely clever. The American ending is typical of American horror films, and sets up the potential for a sequel. Was the ending change a decision that you made or something Lionsgate came up with?

NEIL MARSHALL: It was a decision I made. Because there is such a distance between the U.K. and U.S. release of the film it provided me with an opportunity that is very rare for filmmakers. I toyed with the ending that’s in the U.S. while I was in the editing suite. I tried it both ways and we decided to go with the scripted ending, the ending that we all set out to achieve. That’s what we did. The response that we got was that it absolutely split the audience 50/50, some folks loved it and others hated it. I felt that given this second chance lets try it with the other ending and see what the response is. So far that response has been pretty good. Also, I did that knowing that the full ending would end up on the DVD. It’s not like people are going to get to see it. It’s the one advantage that filmmakers have these days. I make no secret about the fact that that will happen. Still, I wanted to see what the response would be to that ending and how the film played.

W.O.F.: “Dog Soldiers” got a cult following here in the States because we have many of the British film magazines on our newsstands and the coverage on the Internet. Do you feel that there is more of a world view of the cinema today and it allows you to reach a larger audience?

NEIL MARSHALL: I think the Internet is helping and the DVD market as well. It’s kind of impossible for me to say, as I’m not an American, I’m not over here. From my point of view I’d have to say yes… possibly.