The Descent [From The Writer/Director of Dog Soldiers]

[matt35mm]

This is a very effective horror film, and one I highly recommend seeing on the big screen.  Darkness and claustrophobia play a big part in the style of the film.  And no one has ever looked as good drenched in blood than the lead looks in this.  Most of the other girls looked pretty good, too.  And Nora-Jane Noone was in it!

The US ending is different from the UK ending.  I won't say why or how, but you can find all of that online if you want to.  I don't know which ending has played in other countries.

[squints]

I'm actually really anxious to see this (solely from the reviews i've read) because I can't remember the last time I was actually frightened in the theater. we just got Dog Soliders in the store, so is it necessary for me to see that before the descent? i know the stories not related..but...?

[matt35mm]

I'm actually really anxious to see this (solely from the reviews i've read) because I can't remember the last time I was actually frightened in the theater. we just got Dog Soliders in the store, so is it necessary for me to see that before the descent? i know the stories not related..but...?

I have not seen Dog Soldiers, so my answer is no, because The Descent was still very effective for me.

[modage]

I'm actually really anxious to see this (solely from the reviews i've read) because I can't remember the last time I was actually frightened in the theater. we just got Dog Soliders in the store, so is it necessary for me to see that before the descent? i know the stories not related..but...?

not at all neccesary. completely different sorts of films.  but still see both.

[MacGuffin]

Comic-Con 2006: Neil Marshall Interview
Writer-director of The Descent.

While at Comic-Con International in San Diego, IGN FilmForce got the chance to speak one-on-one with British filmmaker Neil Marshall about his new film, The Descent. Lionsgate will release the U.K. horror hit stateside on August 4.

IGN FilmForce: What sort of goals did you set for yourself when you set out to do The Descent? Was it to top Dog Soldiers or to try something a little different?

Neil Marshall: The primary reason was to do a scary movie. I set out to do a horror film with Dog Soldiers and what I came out with at the end of the day was something that was more of a cult movie, more of a black comedy with some horror elements in it. It kind of went over the top. The stuff I'd thought would be kind of gory became funny because of the way that we played it. That was all planned, it was all deliberate, that was all cool. It's something that I'm immensely proud of. But then I sat down and thought, "What I really want to do is a movie that terrifies people." There's two kinds of horror films that I love, and Dog Soldiers is more in line with Evil Dead 2. I thought I want to make a horror movie more in line with Alien and The Shining and Deliverance and The Thing and all these other great horror films that I've grown up with and love, and what I consider to be the best horror films in my life. So I set out with just a single-minded purpose to terrify the audience.

IGNFF: Was it always going to be an all-female cast?

Marshall: Not initially. It was going to be a mixed group and then somebody suggested to me in an off-handed comment, "Why not make it all women?" I just thought that was a brilliant idea. I'd never seen anything like that before in this kind of film. Brutal horror-action film with an all-female ensemble cast seemed pretty unique and original and very contemporary.

IGNFF: They all seemed like real women. Beautiful but real.

Marshall: There couldn't be six bimbos going down into a cave, it had to be real. It had to be authentic so I studied the climbing fraternity and the caving fraternity. At the same time, I couldn't make them unpleasant to the eye. We wanted to make them attractive but they also had to be individual and real and different types.

IGNFF: Was there ever any trepidation on the part of the film's financiers about using an all-female cast?

Marshall: When I first went to the financiers, it was in place that it was going to be an all-female cast. They didn't bat an eyelid. They were fine with it from the start.

IGNFF: What was the most rewarding or surprising part of making this film?

Marshall: Certainly working with the six girls was incredibly rewarding. I went in with my eyes open. Dog Soldiers had been a blast because I'd gone off with six guys and were off in Luxembourg. Drinking every night and shooting guns all day. It was like, "What a blast." And this was different. It was going to be six girls in a cave. It could have gone horribly, horribly wrong. [laughs] It could have been unbearable but it wasn't. They were pretty much on the same level as the Dog Soldiers guys. They were just a real team and totally delivered as far as acting was concerned. On a day-to-day basis, they were so committed to getting that film made and made well. It was just really rewarding to work with them, and now to count them all as friends is a great deal. But I think the main reward, in the U.K. anyway, was that the critics accepted the film. There's a real kind of snobbery in the U.K. about horror films. It's not quite taken seriously, and the critics in the U.K. just totally embraced it. It was one of the best-reviewed British films of last year and that was a real achievement. Then now, to get a U.S. release like the size that it's getting. Because it was just a little film.

IGNFF: Where did you film this? Because it's set in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Marshall: All the cave sets were at Pinewood Studios. All the exterior stuff was done in Scotland. Never set foot outside of England.

IGNFF: Tell me about directing the actors who played the cave dwellers.

Marshall: They were all actors I'd worked with before. Two of them were in Dog Soldiers. Obviously, they're heavily disguised but I'd worked with them in previous films as well. They were part of a theater company that did a lot of very physical performance. I observed this and thought these guys were going to be right for what I'm doing. Physically, they just had the right build for it. Because the only thing we added on to them was just a prosthetic face. Everything else was just them with body paint and tons of KY Jelly. Before we got to the shoot, we worked with them again and again and again. We went through attack patterns. How are these things going to move? I said I wanted them to move like spiders. Most of the time they'd be static, just listening and all of a sudden they'd just go! That's what makes you freak out about spiders and that's what will make you freak about these things. They scuttle really fast. Then they stop. Then they scuttle again. It keeps you on edge the entire time.

IGNFF: Did you work out any sort of backstory for them?

Marshall: My theory was these were the cavemen who stayed in the cave. The rest came out and evolved and became the human race. These went into the cave and evolved and adapted and became these cave creatures. So they are human. They're just an offshoot of the human race. I wanted to apply that logic to the way that they looked. If they'd been living underground for thousands of years, the pigment in their skin's changed. They're blind. They use their smell and their hearing to hunt. They've got a sonar capacity like bats. They've really adapted, scuttling around the caves. And I just thought we'd apply that to the way they were going to look and behave. There was initially, at least in the first cut of the film, a brief scene where one of the characters attempted to guess this, to explain this. And we cut it out because I thought it was better to leave this ambiguous. We didn't need to explain too much. But that's my story.

IGNFF: Is there any sort of metaphorical significance to the whole story?

Marshall: Other people have come up with stories, which kind of is intentional, about it being a kind of journey back into the womb. The slimey dark passages with little white guys running around. The blood cave. It's all in there. A lot of it was deliberate because it occurred to me while we were making it. I was designing passages that looked like various orifices and things like that. That was just a lot of fun.

[Astrostic]

ADMIN EDIT: SPOILERS!!!! (evidently,he's so pissed about the movie being spoiled, he wants to spoil it for everyone else too!)[/b]

I saw this at a sneak preview on wednesday night, and the experience was one of the most enraging theatre experiences I've ever had.  Right before the film, they showed a half-hour featurette/making-of documentary on the film, that revealed every single plot point and scare that was in the film, right down to the fate of each of the girls in the film.  it also showed how the make-up artists created the creatures in the cave, which totally took any of their shock or horror value away, and made me really angry for the entire film to where I wasn't able to get into it at all.

[MacGuffin]

The US ending is different from the UK ending.  I won't say why or how, but you can find all of that online if you want to.  I don't know which ending has played in other countries.

*REALLY HUGE, MAJOR F'ING SPOILERS*







Got Blood?
The Descent has a horrific ending—too bad you'll never see it in theaters.

With the eye gouging, disembowelments, and pickaxes to the neck, the upcoming British gorefest The Descent doesn't leave much to the imagination. But there's one thing you won't see in the theater on Aug. 4: the horror flick's original ending. While our friends in the U.K.—where The Descent has already come, gone, grossed $5 million, and been released on DVD—loved the film, they weren't digging its überhopeless finale. So when the U.S. debut rolled around, Lionsgate decided to release Neil Marshall's Deliverance-style tale about six female cave explorers slaughtered by a cadre of creepy crawlers without the downbeat finale. (What happens in the original? We're not going to spoil it for you, but let's just say the body count is different.)

''It's a visceral ride, and by the time you get to the ending you're drained,'' says Lionsgate marketing chief Tim Palen. ''Marshall had a number of endings in mind when he shot the film, so he was open [to making a switch].'' The director's ultimate solution? Sub in one of his alternate shots, and cut the last minute or so of the movie. Of course, both scenarios are expected to make it to DVD, giving fans an opportunity—à la 28 Days Later—to choose the heroine's fate for themselves. And if you decide to check out The Descent in theaters, remember: Even though the story has been perked up, that doesn't mean everything is sunshine and lollipops. In fact, Marshall likens the denouement to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: ''Just because she gets away, does that make it a happy ending?''

--------------------------------------------------------------------

The Descent 2
Neil Marshall, helmer of the new horror pic "The Descent," told Bloody Disgusting that he's already writing a sequel. "A treatment is in the works, I'm not directing it, but I will oversee it and want to be a part of it. We have no directors or cast in mind yet, we just got our first draft yesterday. I set some strict rules about what I want it to be and I don't want it to be a rehashing of the first. Based on the reaction of people is that we struck a nerve with the claustrophobia scene, a lot of people say that scene is the one that stuck. The monsters they can deal with, and a bit of the claustrophobia, they can deal with, but the combination is definitely something we want to incorporate that into the sequel, by putting the monster AND the girls in a really tight spot."

[MacGuffin]

Exclusive: The Descent's Neil Marshall

*READ AT OWN RISK*

The best thing about the new wave of horror films we've seen in the last few years is that for every remake or derivative waste of film, there's a few original ideas coming along, offering real scares and things to think about afterwards. This year alone, there's been Eli Roth's Hostel and Hard Candy, but a 2005 British horror film called The Descent is finally seeing the light of day (so to speak) here.

Although to the casual viewer, the second movie from filmmaker Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers) might seem like a low budget rip-off of The Cave with more diverse accents, it actually was finished long before that movie, and unlike that forgettable turd (and that's being kind), it's a tense, suspense-filled action-thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat for over an hour before finally throwing vicious creatures and lots of blood and gore at you.

ComingSoon.net had a chance to talk to British director Neil Marshall during the Comic-Con in San Diego, where Lionsgate was screening his film knowing that it was going to find a devout audience of horror fans there.

ComingSoon.net: Since this movie came out in England so long ago, are you bored of talking about it already?
Marshall: No, not at all. It's just talking about it under a whole new set of circumstances now with a release, which I never could have possibly imagined because essentially, it's an underdog film. It's a low-budget, independent British film. To get a 2000-odd screen release in the US is a really, really big deal, so it's great to be back.

CS: How did the movie do over in England?
Marshall: Critically, it was incredibly well-received, and it would have done a lot better had it not come out the day after the terrorist bombings on the Underground. That hugely affected its outcome.

CS: Yeah, you don't want to see a movie about people trapped in a cave after that.
Marshall: Exactly, people trapped underground really wasn't going to play.

CS: It seems that coming up with an idea for a movie in which six women are trapped in a cave is a stroke of genius... if only because you get to make a film with six women in a cave. Where did this idea come from?
Marshall: When I first conceived the idea of a team going into a cave, it was going to be a mixed group and then a friend of mine, really off-handedly suggested, "Why not make it all women?" and something clicked there. I just thought it was a fantastic idea. Nobody's done anything like that before with an all-female, ensemble cast in a brutal action-horror movie. It was something I'd never heard of and I thought, "Let's do it." It seemed contemporary, it seemed original, it seemed like it could be absolute hell, but also a lot of fun and I just went with it.

CS: How much fun was it being with actresses all the time?
Marshall: It turned out to be a lot of fun, it was great. We cast it well. They're a really great bunch of girls, and they're all really close mates now after the experience. I think it's almost like battle trauma. They've all been through it together, and now they're all close-knit friends. It was great. They were 200% behind the project and supported me all the way and vice versa, and that helped get the performances out of them.

CS: So how did you go about cast it? Usually, these types of films will go with the model bimbo type in the roles.
Marshall: That was something I very specifically wanted to avoid. I didn't want to get that route at all. It was integral to me that they should be a realistic bunch of women. That's not to say that they were going to be unattractive to the eye. That was important. People are going to want to go see these girls for 90 minutes, but I didn't want them to look like a bunch of supermodels down a cave. So we spent a long time casting essentially unknowns really. They'd done some TV work, some of them had done some features, but they hadn't had a huge amount of experience. So what I got was actors who had everything to gain and nothing to lose, and as such, they just mucked in. I put them through hell physically for this film and they came out smiling, because they were just enjoying it so much.

CS: Did any of them have climbing experience or did you have to train all of them on how to climb before shooting it?
Marshall: Some of them had minor experience. They were all kind of fitness freaks, all into going to the gym and all that, which was really vital for the part, but we put them through two weeks worth of intense climbing training, white water rafting training for the opening sequence, and we all went caving together before the shoot. That was good as both just a training experience as well as a bonding experience. I wanted to make sure it was authentic, and they got a taste of just how rough it was going to be.

CS: What was the most difficult thing about shooting the caves on a limited budget? The lighting must have been hell for the DP...
Marshall: Not really, because we actually faked the whole thing. There isn't a single real cave in the whole movie.

CS: No, really?
Marshall: Everything was faked. We've got a couple of miniatures, a couple of matte shots, but everything else was at the studios at Pinewood. We decided very early on that it was going to be totally impractical, too dangerous and just impossible to film in a real cave. Because the action was very specific to what was happening in the cave, so we'd almost have to cast the cave. Or dig one. (laughs) So it just seemed much more logical to make it, but to make it real. And the way we did that was to not have ground bases was to innovate constrictive, and awkward and wet and messy and dank and make it that way, so it was deeply unpleasant. And of course we were filming in a studio in January in the UK with no heating in the studio, so it was absolutely freezing all the time, which obviously added to the whole experience for the girls. (laughs)

CS: How do you go about building a cave on a soundstage?
Marshall: We were limited to a number of sets. We only could build six sets. What happened was, because of the nature of the film is that they only ever go through the same cave once, as soon as we finished with a set, we ripped it apart, put it back together, turned it upside down and turned it into another cave. We had a generic, kind of corridor set which is just a winding cave passage. And that got used about twelve times throughout the film. We'd use it once and then we'd re-paint it, stick some boulders on it in different places and then use it again. It became difficult, but we had the advantage with the lighting scheme we were using. I told the DP that I didn't want any light source in the film, other than that which the characters take into the cave with them. It could only be lit by torches, flares, fire, snapsticks, whatever, but nothing else. We don't want any lovely, gratuitous shafts of light coming down into the cave just to make it look good, that's not the point. Anything the light's not shining at should be pitch black, and I think because of that we got away with murder.

CS: It seemed like you tried to do almost everything practically, but did you use any CG at all?
Marshall: There's a couple of CGI composite shots, a couple of matte shots, but none of the creatures were created CGI-wise. They were all real. My opinion on it is that CGI is a great tool. Compositing is what it really does well. It depends on how well it's done. I'm not a huge fan of CG animation in terms of creature animation, very rarely does it look good and even now, nothing has come close to "Jurassic Park" and how long ago was that? Thirteen years ago? So I try and avoid that. I did it with "Dog Soldiers," I did it with this. As far as I'm concerned, if I can do it in camera and do it for real, I'd much rather do it that way. It looks better on film. It's much more lasting. It's better for the actors, because they've got something to react to. Some of the fight sequences in the film we couldn't have done that unless we had something practical or it just wouldn't look as good so that was my kind of take on it.

CS: One thing I really liked about this film is that you avoided all the clichés of explaining who the creatures were or where they came from. Did you have some idea what they were supposed to be?
Marshall: Absolutely. Initially, there was a very brief scene where one of the characters attempts to figure it out - what they are and where they've come from--and we just decided to leave it out and let people think what they want to think. My idea is that they're an offshoot of humanity; they're the cavemen that stayed in the cave. Where the rest of us evolved, they kind of devolved and became these cave-dwelling things. They went blind. They've lost the pigmentation in their skin. They hunt by sound and smell, using sonar like bats. They've totally evolved in their environment, but they've still remained essentially human, and have human characteristics like family and society, and I thought that was far more scary.

CS: You really build a lot of tension by holding off on showing the creatures and the horror for so long. Can you talk about the decisions you made with the pacing?
Marshall: It was kind of a three-act structure. The first act was about meeting the characters and getting to the cave. The second act was going to be all about utilizing the horror of the cave itself. Just caving in itself is a terrifying thing. There's claustrophobia and heights and the dark and bats and drowning and any number of ways to die, specifically claustrophobia, I just wanted to milk it for all its worth. And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, then we have the third act, and you find out it's a lot worse then they ever thought. So it was because of that really, I just wanted to ramp-up the tension. Also because my belief is that if you start the film all the way up at level 10 you've got nowhere to go. Your audience will burn-out and don't care by half an hour into the film. They're just waiting for the end, they're not really shocked by anything. So you have to ramp it up really, really slowly. If you do that, then you've got so much investment in the characters, and you've been on the edge of your seat for so long, you're relieved when actually the shocks come in somewhat. It allows you for the last half an hour to just go all the way to 11 and stay there and you can sustain that there. You leave the audience totally reeling and shell-shocked by the end of it.

CS: There's been mention that the movie had a different ending when released in the UK. What's that about?
Marshall: It was just an opportunity as a filmmaker to do what I hadn't been able to do the first time out. We stuck with the scripted ending in the UK. It's the ending I wanted to make, absolutely, I love it. It's a great ending. That got released and that's great, but the feedback on it was that it really split audiences. Some people loved it and thought it was a great ending but some people thought it was a terrible ending and didn't get it. When I was in the edit of the film I did try this alternate ending and then decided not to bother with it. Then all of a sudden the possibility of a US release came along, and I thought, "Okay, can we try it with this alternate ending?" and Lionsgate said yes.

CS: So the ending that we'll see in the States was the original one you came up with or is that the one shown in the UK?
Marshall: No, but it was an alternative that I came up with. It's not like I have any feelings left for it. I think it's an equally interesting ending.

CS: Can you also talk a bit about your influences? There seems to be a different sensibility because you're British, but what movies did you grow up watching?
Marshall: The films that inspired this were "Deliverance," "The Shining," "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Alien," and "The Thing." Really those were the major ones I grew up with [and] still kind of haunt me to this day. The power of those films stuck with me, whereas so many others have fallen by the wayside. That's what I set out to make, was to try and make something of that intensity, and something that took itself seriously, that wasn't going to be a tongue-in-cheek horror movie. It was going to be straight down the line, that's what I wanted to do.

CS: How upset were you when they released "The Cave"?
Marshall: We knew about it. We heard it was in production when we were in production, and we had a bit of a panic attack initially because there was there was this other cave movie. There hadn't been a cave movie in years and all of the sudden there's two at once. We knew that they had a much bigger budget than us, and we just thought, "This is terrible." We all sat down and thought about it awhile and thought, at the end of the day, it is a big-budget film. It's going to be very different from ours, and as it turned out it was and we just stuck with it. In the UK, we managed to turn the film around so quickly, that we got it out into cinemas before "The Cave" came out. And then "The Cave" came out in the UK and the US. When Lionsgate picked it up for release, they basically wanted to put as much distance between us and "The Cave" as possible, so that meant not only waiting for the film to come out, but after the DVD came out, and that's why it's taken so long.

CS: Since this movie has been done for awhile, what are you working on now?
Marshall: I just started working now on a film called "Doomsday," which is kinda my post-apocalyptic adventure, sci-fi movie, in the vein of "Escape From New York" or "Mad Max." So that's just about to kick-off. It's with Rogue Pictures, and it's a much bigger budget than what I've done before, so it's going to be an adventure, that's for sure. When I get back to the UK, I begin casting.

The Descent opens on Friday, August 4.

[MacGuffin]

Neil Marshall has created a very scary movie with The Descent. It is a classic story of a group of people going someplace they shouldn't and encountering monsters. This time it is a group of women who go spelunking and confront cave dwelling monsters. Marshall first made a name for himself in the horror genre with his hybrid Rio Bravo meets werewolves movie Dog Soldiers.

Daniel Robert Epstein: It's funny that people are so surprised that The Descent is actually scary, what's it take to scare an audience now?

Neil Marshall: It is tricky. Audiences are a hell of a lot more jaded and used to horror film tricks. But the one thing that they never get used to, which is rarely used these days, is building suspense slowly and getting under their skins that way. Everybody's used to the loud shocks and the loud bangs and all that stuff so by the end of the film you're completely numb to it, you just don't care anymore. Wolf Creek also did the same thing. They took it slow. You take your time with the characters, invest in them and ramp up the tension slowly but surely until it becomes unbearable and then you let loose. Then you can sustain that for the last 30 minutes of the film or whatever and put them through the ringer then so they will walk out of the film totally shell-shocked.

DRE:At what point did all the actors' cycles start to be in tune?

Neil:They were in tune before we started filming because we'd had about three or four weeks prior doing climbing training and whitewater rafting and caving and all that stuff.

DRE:How many arguments did all five of them win when they teamed up on you?

Neil:None. I went in with my eyes open and thought, "Shit, I'm doing something with six women here, this could end in tears." But they were actually a blast and they never ganged up on me at all. Well, they did one time because I kept the crawlers a secret from them. I didn't let them see anything about the crawlers until the moment they did in the film and it was in front of the camera. So there was a time when they ganged up on me and said, "When are you going to let us see the crawlers?" They were certain that I was just going to stick one in the cave with them at some point and they were right, but I didn't let them see them [laughs].

DRE:The American commercials for The Descent show the money shot of the crawlers, what do you think of that?

Neil:I wasn't too troubled about it.

[Marshall suddenly tapes his left hand on his chair]

DRE:That's a poker tell, you're definitely not happy about it.

Neil:[laughs] Yeah, I wasn't too pleased about it because the moment that they show is one of these big shot moments in the film. It would be like showing the head falling moment in Jaws in the trailer. But at the end of the day Lionsgate has a pretty good track record. Who am I to argue with what they do because they know their stuff.

DRE:What was the inspiration for the crawlers?

Neil:The physicality of Iggy Pop. That muscular but also sinewy and scrawny physique but most of it was based on the logic of the concept of what if there was this offshoot of the human race that stayed in the caves and evolved to live there. They would have gone blind, their skin would have gone all pallid, they'd become great climbers and they'd have to have sonar to navigate in the pitch black. I was also adamant to have good actors with the right physicality to do it and very little makeup so that they could express themselves. I didn't just want it to be a big rubber mask so we used this silicone makeup which is incredibly flexible and allowed them to give their performances.

DRE:Feminist themes in this movie are very subtle but were they on purpose?

Neil:To me it was more important that the story didn't hinge upon them being women. What was important to me was to have nothing in the story about them being six women. They could just as easily be replaced by six men and it'd be exactly the same film.

DRE:What made you want to put in that twist towards the end?

Neil:The inspiration for that was total audience manipulation. The audience is totally behind her and then she turns around and she does something that is a complete fuck up. The audience is left gasping and as a director that is incredibly satisfying.

DRE:With Dog Soldiers and now The Descent you are twisting genres. But you don't do it in a post modern way or deconstructionist way.

Neil:Deliberately so. I'm just trying to tell the story in a more classic way which is why Dog Soldiers has references to Howard Hawks and John Ford movies throughout. I loved their way of telling stories. It was not post modernism; they were just telling it the way it was. With Dog Soldiers I wanted to do a siege, monster, soldier, werewolf movie.

DRE:Was The Descent the idea of people going to a place they shouldn't but the twist might be they're all women?

Neil:The Descent was purely a desire to do what I hadn't done or what I felt I hadn't done in Dog Soldiers, which was make a really scary movie.

DRE:Did you feel that Dog Soldiers was unsuccessful?

Neil:I feel like I ended up making more of a horror comedy. I watch it now and I still laugh at the jokes but I never found it scary. I don't know that many people did.

DRE:Was it a conscious decision to ramp down the humor with The Descent?

Neil:No, the majority of the humor in Dog Soldiers came from the fact that they were soldiers and it was soldiers' humor. There's something about soldiers where when they are put in a life threatening situation they make humor out of it and that was the humor that I wanted in Dog Soldiers and that's what I got and it worked. But these weren't soldiers, they were regular people who are climbers therefore the same humor wouldn't apply to them. There was also the desire not to make a funny film. There had to be little elements, just comic relief to counteract the horror but mainly it was a very different concept and aesthetic. I set out with a single-minded determination to make something as terrifying as possible.

DRE:I no longer ask horror directors what they're being offered; I ask them what remakes they're being offered.

Neil:So far I haven't been offered any.

DRE:Would you be interested?

Neil:In Fangoria I said that I'd be interested in doing a remake of The Car. That's a James Brolin movie with this big black car out in the desert that comes around and starts killing people. It's like Jaws with a car. It is one of the films that I enjoy watching because it's hokey but it could be done vastly better.

DRE:Would you pull out the hokiness or make it straight up horror?

Neil:Make it straight up horror but I think you can only be so un-hokey when you're dealing with a killer car. I'm only half serious about that. When I was asked that question The Car was the first thing that came to mind. I'm not in a big hurry to make remakes. More often than not the ones that they do want to make remakes of were masterpieces in the first place. I don't mind if they're making remakes of something that wasn't particularly good or had flaws. I really liked The Hills Have Eyes remake.

DRE:Were the Universal monsters touchstones for you?

Neil:Certainly the first monster movies I ever saw were Frankenstein and The Wolfman and that's part of the reason I wanted to do a werewolf movie first thing out. I like the classic ones but I'm sick of seeing vampires. There are way too many vampire movies and I thought that werewolves hadn't been really done that much or done that well for a while and that's what we needed so I went back to the classics for that. But with The Descent I just thought that we needed something completely fresh and new.

DRE:What are you writing now?

Neil:I'm just about to start work on a new film called Doomsday, which is a post apocalyptic sci-fi adventure movie.

DRE:With monsters?

Neil:No monsters. Plague victims, things like that.

DRE:Zombie-esque?

Neil:Not really, it's Escape from New York meets Mad Max.

DRE:Will you shoot that overseas?

Neil:We're probably going to shoot it in South Africa.

DRE:What movies have you liked recently?

Neil:I enjoyed Superman Returns. I appreciated that it wasn't made for kids. It was actually intended toward my generation a bit. It had moments for kids but you had to appreciate Superman I and II in order to really get it and they had the sense to use the right music and all that stuff. The next movie I'm excited about is The Prestige.

[MacGuffin]

First Rule Of 'The Descent': You Do Not Talk About 'The Descent'
'It's a dark ride,' film's director says of secretive horror flick, which hits theaters Friday.   

SAN DIEGO — Moviegoers worldwide who have already become devout fans of "The Descent" have built impressive buzz around the terrifying flick that hits theaters this weekend.

The fervor surrounding the film's U.S. release is even more impressive, however, when you consider the cult audience's politely observed "Fight Club"-like rule: You do not talk about "The Descent."

"I've been really careful," star Natalie Mendoza said recently, urging people to maintain the film's secrets. "I don't want to say anything to give it away. One of my friends went to see it, and I really didn't tell him what to expect. He was so shocked. He thought it was terrifying enough, with all the claustrophobic caving moments. ... Then all of a sudden, the film takes a turn."

It's the first of many turns in the twisted terror tale, which features more unexpected diversions than the Appalachian Mountains pit that swallows Mendoza and her female co-stars, turning their "Ya-Ya Sisterhood" weekend into something more like the bloodiest episode of "The View."

"I thought it was such an unusual concept to have an all-woman cast," beamed Mendoza, who added that the flick makes for a great ladies' night out. "It's a girl-power kind of film."

"For men, you get to watch six really beautiful women go down a cave in Lycra," laughed director Neil Marshall, the British mastermind behind another cult favorite, the 2002 werewolf thriller "Dog Soldiers." "[This film] is about much more than just a physical descent. It's a descent into savagery, and it's a descent into madness. It's a dark ride."

According to Mendoza, that promise alone has been enough to attract huge audiences in other countries and at film festivals, where the film has been playing for more than a year.

"We started it from such a humble beginning," marveled the actress, who has appeared briefly in American releases like "Moulin Rouge" and "Code 46." "It was an independent film. It was pretty low-budget, with six unknown actors. ... I was so amazed at how it was perceived in London. To know that it was well-received internationally is absolutely astounding and amazing."

"It's been a pretty long journey," grinned Marshall, who recently screened the film for a sold-out geek audience at Comic-Con, the California celebration of all things geeky. "It came out in the U.K. in July last year, and since then, it's opened right across the world. ... Critically, it's done really well. It's picked up some awards in the U.K. too, which is unheard of for a horror film."

Now, thanks to heavy support from U.S. distribution company Lionsgate, the unspeakable horror flick is building a notorious reputation alongside the studio's "Saw" and "Hostel" film franchises. Lionsgate has been handing out Depends adult diapers to viewers, and advance screenings have featured audio of women screaming in terror while the audience waits for the movie to begin. Typically, viewers take over the screaming themselves once the lights go down.

"I've watched it quite a few times, where I like to sit at the back and just watch the audience screaming and jumping," Marshall laughed. "We played it a few times in the U.K. where, literally, people were being carried out, traumatized, in tears and stuff. I just think that's great. As a horror film director, that's what you want."

"The audience was really chilly," Mendoza said of one recent screening she attended. "Everyone was moving. You could see that everybody felt completely ill."

Since any real horror fan would never dare discuss what those unfortunate women discover at the bottom of Boreham Caverns, we'll instead turn our attention to another terrifying facet of "The Descent": the fact that its concept is virtually identical to "The Cave," an already-forgotten clunker that made many critics' lists of the worst films of 2005.

"It's so amazing, because it's one of those odd things that happen repeatedly," Mendoza said of similar-timed flicks like "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" or "Dante's Peak" and "Volcano." "These films bubbled up out of different countries, different groups of people, but the story line is really quite similar."

So similar, in fact, that the "Cave" release ended up inadvertently dictating the methodical "Descent" rollout.

"We were really clever in England to move the film release forward so that we beat 'The Cave,' " Mendoza remembered. "Our release wasn't hindered by that. And I think Lionsgate has been really clever in putting the U.S. film release off, so that people could forget 'The Cave,' hopefully, and enjoy this film for what it is."

Now, the two films seem like they could be linked together as mandatory viewing for future generations of film students. With their "spelunkers under siege" concepts and "evolved cave dweller" frights, it's fascinating to watch how one director taps into such fear while the other filmmaker gets lost among the darkness.

"Neil was on such a tight budget," Mendoza said of the biggest difference. "He had to get all the storyboards so tight, and the story so tight, because he couldn't afford to waste money on unnecessary things. ... It's a great example of what is possible when money and focus go into the right areas."

You might be wondering what, exactly, all of this "Descent" fuss is about. To get you into the proper mood, this is all Mendoza recommends that you know: "[The characters have] been friends for a long time, we've gone to university together," she said. "We have these annual get-togethers where I take the girls on an expedition of some sort, some sporting event. One year, we go on this whitewater rafting trip and, devastatingly, [a character's] husband ends up being killed along with her young daughter.

"A year later, she has gone through the whole process of recovery," Mendoza added. "I put together this caving expedition, and as the film develops, this caving trip goes completely wrong. It brings out, in all of us, the inner venom."

If you're lucky, you'll be able to experience the horrors of "The Descent" before anyone violates the first rule of the film's fast-growing cult.

[MacGuffin]

Exclusive Profile: DIRECTOR NEIL MARSHALL DIGS DEEP FOR HORROR IN THE DESCENT
The DOG SOLDIERS director has a horror home run with his follow-up feature  

It seems like every week, horror has a new savior, and this week its director Neil Marshall who made a big splash in 2002 with the U.K. horror hit DOG SOLDIERS and is back in action with his exceptional follow-up THE DESCENT.

Following a group of women on a caving expedition that turns into a nightmare as they discover horrific creatures residing below, Marshall has crafted one of the year's most disturbing and creepy horror endeavors and it's not surprising Lions Gate who is distributing the film is touting it "From the Studio That Brought You HOSTEL and SAW."

The following is the one-on-one interview that Marshall granted iF at Comic-Con two weeks ago.

iF MAGAZINE – What did you learn from your DOG SOLDIERS experience that led you into THE DESCENT?

NEIL MARSHALL: I learned the importance of actors and the importance of characters. It's something I developed throughout the script process of DOG SOLDIERS, but then on the shooting, working with the actors. Everybody was so supportive of me as a first time director. It worked both ways, but I also had to have the knowledge when they brought ideas to the table to determine, "that was a really good idea, that was a bad idea." That taught me so much. And then bringing that on to THE DESCENT, I really wanted to make it a character piece. What I always used say about DOG SOLDIERS is that it was a soldier movie with werewolves, it wasn't a werewolf movie with soldiers. THE DESCENT is a movie about six women going in a cave. The fact that there is a supernatural or preternatural element in it, is irrelevant to the story. It's almost a catalyst as to what's going on with the emotions, and reactions with the girls. It's particularly Sarah's story and her journey into insanity and savagery, which compelled me to tell the story.

iF: How come it took so long in between projects?

MARSHALL: We actually made the deal for THE DESCENT about six months after DOG SOLDIERS came out. I wrote the first couple of drafts. The upside was the production company in the U.K. had all the money and could do it outright. The downside, because it was one guy who was already in production on another film, they had to put us on the way side before he could get back on THE DESCENT full time. We did a few more drafts and finally we were ready to go and by that time three years had passed. I spent the time writing. I wrote four other scripts. It was frustrated because I desperately wanted to make another film, but at the same time I didn't want to rush blindly into it. I wanted to make sure the second film was a step up.

iF: What did the bigger budget on THE DESCENT afford you that you didn't have on your first film?

MARSHALL: We had $6 million, so I got a crane. We didn't have a crane on DOG SOLDIERS. It also allowed us to shoot at Pinewood. All the money was well spent. Every penny was on the screen?

iF: What do you think the key is to horror.

MARSHALL: Having the confidence to do a slow build. Not to blow all your horror in the first half-hour of the film. You put a few indicators in there, but to take it slow and ramp up the tension slowly, and that allows you to let loose in the last half hour and allows you to sustain it. If you blow everything in the first half-hour, you don't have anywhere to go. How many shocks can you take. You can only have so many cats jumping out and violin shrieks and things like that before you get tired of it. What I wanted to do is take it slow [with THE DESCENT].There is no traditional horror element in it for the first hour after the initial moment. I wanted to explore the fear and tension of the group in the cave. And the cave is an enemy and it's trying to kill them possibly, one way or another. That's scary unto itself.

iF: Which came first, you or THE CAVE?

MARSHALL: The U.K. distributor said, let's try to get it out before THE CAVE. It was a made deadline. We had finished shooting end of February [in 2005] and had to release it by July and we managed it, and got it out last year, and we knew the CAVE was coming. We knew the title and that it was a much bigger budget than ours. I was pleased when I saw THE CAVE at the end of the day that we didn't have too much to worry about.

iF: Were you concerned about it story-wise?

MARSHALL: We all sat down together and we said, we have this thing, THE CAVE coming out, what are we going to do? Well, we're not going to do anything different. Our movie is inherently going to be different. It's a low budget, dark edged British film. There's no way this big studio picture is going to have the same ending or the same thing as our film. So we just made our film.

iF: Why change the ending?

MARSHALL: I don't have any favorite, I love both endings. Having done one, which went out, as we intended, as we scripted. That worked great and it split audiences 50/50. Some people loved it, some hated it and given a second chance like this, let's put the other one and see how it goes. I guarantee they'll release both alternative versions on DVD here.

iF: What's next?

MARSHALL: I'm about to start making a post-apocalyptic movie called DOOMSDAY. It's kind of like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK meets MAD MAX 2?

iF: How do you see yourself as a filmmaker? Do you want to be perceived as a horror director or do you want to be perceived as a director who does different things?

MARSHALL: I'd like to be perceived as a genre film director. I've got lots of stories. I love action. All my films have that thread, but they're all different genres?

iF: What would you have done for DOG SOLDIERS 2 if you had the chance to make a sequel?

MARSHALL: I had an idea involving the story of Cooper being carted off to an asylum and finding that the hiker at the beginning of DOG SOLDIERS was still alive and a patient at the asylum and he had bit a bunch of the other patients. The ghosts of all the soldiers along the way are also visiting Cooper. The debate was whether people made it up or he had gone mad and all this time there's a full moon coming, and the other patients are going to start turning into werewolves. It was all sorts of crazy ideas. It was this notion people in the asylum where you had werewolves and the people pretending to be werewolves since they're all mad anyway

[modage]

i really wish they didnt give away so much in the ads.

[SiliasRuby]

Saw this last night, Best Horror film I've seen in a while.

Spoiler!!!!
It's too bad they cut out the original ending that was in the british film that explains why we keep seeing the birthday cake over and over.
Spoiler End!

[RegularKarate]

To be honest, I kind of think it's a cheap gag and the US ending isn't a cop out in any way.  It's still dark.
I'm still confused as to what they reshot... seems like they just changed where they ended it.


END SPOILERS...

I really liked this movie and while, yeah, it would have been cool if I hadn't known what the ads showed, it doesn't really affect that much.  The scene where she's stuck really got me twisting in my seat.

[Gold Trumpet]

A few spoilers. Well, many spoilers.

This movie is silly. Was I supposed to be scared? Really? Every year I get duped to see one of these movies. Critical buzz gets me curious to think maybe the new horror film can transcend its genre. Each time I am more and more dissapointed. This film, yes, is the worst one so far.

There are so many problems. First, the film has no pyschological aura to its horror. The monsters in the cave appear without warning or even without explanation. They kill and kill. The only detail this film gives to who they are is how disgusting they are with killing. See, the films follows the motif of recent horror films. Ever since Halloween horror films have focused on bodily harm instead of psychological terror. Psychological terror in films started in Germany in the 10s and continued til the 70s. I prefer horror films that focus on pyschological terror, but Halloween and others must be given some credit. They were able to create horror monsters who ran in sync to many of our fears and weaknesses. Michael Meyers plays up to the legend of Halloween I grew up to and Freddy Krueger goes after our vulnerabilities in our dreams. The window that this film was able to draw in had nothing to do with the monsters. It had everything to do with the setting. Claustophobia is the major fear of going into caves (and I am very claustophobic) and yet the film only commits one scene to that. Yes, that scene made me shut my eyes and twist and turn. It was the scariest scene. The problem is that it had nothing to do with the monsters or the bulk of this film.

Second, the monsters have nothing unique to them that is terrifying. They are disguting but they are also blind and vulnerable. Many more of the monsters were killed than were humans. The little objectivity these monsters are given to even being scary is that all of their attacks come out of nowhere and that they eat humans. Any film can make someone jump out of their seat it if continually uses the angle of not knowing what is around the corner. That's obvious. Then the use of gore becomes numbing as it does for any film that over uses it. By the final battle I was perfectly numb to any new way the film could show someone dying.

The major problem of this film is the characterization. The interesting strand of this film is the story of Sarah and how she relates every terrifying moment to the tragedy of her family dying. The problem is that this strand dies out after the claustophobia scene. Every killing and moment of terror afterward has nothing unique to say about her situation. All the characters feel the same terror as she does because they are all vulnerable to be killed gruesomely. Sarah becomes another victim-to-be in the caves and even becomes harder to distinguish because they all run around with blood and sweat on their faces. The film doesn't even make mention of her situation again at all. It picks up a new subplot that involves one character accidentinally hurting another and the victim thinking it was purposeful. It ends up creating a double cross that has little believability or logic.

I think I know why this film is being hyped. The film doesn't rush into all the gore. It is patient and takes its time to get the characters into the caves. Also, the filmmaking doesn't overdue it. There was one unnessary camera trick at the beginning in the hospital but for the most part the camerawork is simple and doesn't announce a bad genre film right away. The music is heightened but in the way that quality horror films of the 70s did it. The major element is that it did have an interesting story to set up. The film just had nowhere to go with it. It became as goofy and as dissapointing for me as every other horror film.

EDIT: I just watched the UK ending. It is a better ending but it adds very little to the film. When I was watching the film in the theaters I didn't understand where the girl in the car came from. She obviously wasn't a monster nor a ghost of her daughter. The UK ending is more plausible in saying that Sarah will never get out. It was unlikely any character would anyways. The ending adds very little though because it tries to retouch on the original theme which the film barely had interest in. It makes the ending come off as hackneyed.