THE DESCENT

Right around the top of my “Now, that’s a nightmare!” list – which is a list of things that when I think about them I say “Now, that’s a nightmare!” – is getting stuck crawling through a cave. The idea of crawling through rock that gets increasingly smaller and your back is touching the stone above you and you’re crawling on your belly and then you get stuck and you can’t go forward or back. Fuck! Off! I didn’t even enjoy writing that sentence. And I firmly believe my fear of that nightmare comes from watching The Descent.

I don’t think I was always like this – I loved caves when I was a kid, not just caves but crawling through tunnels. I have fond memories of crawling around in the sewers with my mates when I was twelve. At some point along my journey into adulthood my brain started thinking about the consequences of my actions and these days I can’t imagine anything more terrifying than getting stuck in those concrete tunnels that ran under our suburb. I bet if I could pinpoint the exact moment the switch happened in my brain I reckon it would have been right around 2005 when this came out.

The Descent is a near perfect horror movie. It’s the story of a group of women who go cave diving off the beaten track and get lost down there and come across a horrifying pack of blind inhuman monsters. Who’s to say whether they have a good or bad time in those caves. I will say this though: it is scary in every way possible. The sort of movie that will leave your face covered in stress lines from doing this face the whole time: [the look you make you groan the word ‘urgghhhhh’]

There’s a second Descent movie out there, which should be titled The Descent: Further Down but is titled The Descent Part 2 and it’s fine but it’s better to believe that there is no sequel and that this story ends when these credits roll. The first one is so good and the second one asks the question: “What if there was more of this and it wasn’t as good?”

How would I fit into The Descent? I’ll let you in on a little secret about the younger version of myself, I was a big “one of the girls” guy. There are “one of the guys” girls and there are “one of the girls” guys, and I have lived the life of a “one of the girls” guy. I’ve been on a few girl’s weekends in my time and it’s very easy to see how I would fit into The Descent. No fucking way you’d be getting me in that cave though.