I’ll admit, I had trouble keeping track of all of the characters at first, as The Descent is a dark movie, but very soon, they start to get killed off, either from the Crawlers, the cave environment, or in one particularly gruesome moment, a large stone induced mercy killing. By the time you reach the 30-minute mark, the tension has already hit the high-water mark for most other horror movies, but amazingly, the film keeps going, and it keeps going higher.
And yet, what makes the film great isn’t the copious amounts of bloodshed and murder; it’s the raw human emotion underneath it all that elevates The Descent and embraces the very best parts of the horror genre.
