AFRAID OF THE DARK? YOU WILL BE.
Six friends climb down an unnamed cave in the Appalachian Mountains and soon find themselves battling monsters as well as each other. Director Neil Marshall delivers another grisly horror movie after Dog Soldiers (2002) and this one is scary. It doesn’t break new ground, but Marshall knows how to make you care for the characters and fear the monsters, creatures that are creepy because they remind you of human beings. Having an all-female cast is a novel idea and the ladies are not presented as sexual objects; their performances are good. Reminiscent of other horror flicks, this one nevertheless delivers plenty of spills and thrills.
2005-Britain. 99 min. Color. Widescreen. Produced by Christian Colson. Written and directed by Neil Marshall. Cast: Shauna MacDonald (Sarah), Natalie Mendoza (Juno), Alex Reid (Beth), Saskia Mulder, Nora-Jane Noone, MyAnna Buring.
Trivia: Followed by The Descent: Part 2 (2009).
Last word: “Looking back at ‘Dog Soldiers’, I thought it wasn’t particularly scary. It came out as a black comedy more than anything else. I still had this fundamental need in me to make a horror film that genuinely terrified people. In the same way that I was genuinely terrified by the likes of ‘Deliverance’Â or ‘Alien’Â or ‘The Shining’, all those films from the ’70s that I grew up with and have haunted me ever since. There was also a need to make a horror film that took itself seriously, that played it straight. So the story emerged from that desire really.” (Marshall, The Evening Class)
