Bloody Perfect: I Will Follow You Into The Dark
Isaura Barbé-Brown brings us the next post in her new monthly column, Bloody Perfect.
I first saw The Descent (2005) when I lived in New York, in a Harlem sublet with two housemates. We didn’t have any cable, but we did have a big black folder of DVDs. Out of the DVDs housed in that folder (a truly wondrous thing), we picked The Descent to watch one deep dark night, and the final scare made me jump so hard that my heart stopped beating for a moment (I swear it stopped) and this deep dark horror was cemented as one of my all-time favourites.
The film is about a group of thrill-seeking women who go on adventures together in the wilderness. After one such adventure, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) loses her husband and daughter in a tragic traffic accident. A year later, the friends reunite to go caving and hopefully bolster Sarah’s spirits. What they don’t know is that Juno (Natalie Mendoza), has planned an expedition into an unexplored and unchartered cave. Once in there, after a claustrophobic crawl through a narrow passage, there is a cave collapse blocking the entrance they came from, forcing all of them deeper into the cave to find another way out. Being stuck in a cave is bad enough, but what’s worse is finding out you’re not alone. In the cave with them are blind, vicious, humanoid creatures who hunt by sound, are hungry for flesh and perfectly evolved to live in the dark and the damp. The women realise they might not only be stuck, but could also be eaten, and their fight for survival becomes a test of quick thinking and nerve holding.
The best scene in the film comes when Sarah is up alone, after watching Holly (Nora-Jane Noone) become a three-course meal for a gaggle of monsters. She has the wherewithal to Macgyver a flaming torch. She fights off a monster and his pissed off monster girlfriend. She wades across a deep(ly disgusting) pool of blood, slowly sinking until she disappears underneath. Just when you think she may have drowned, Sarah resurfaces and takes out the monster girlfriend. As Sarah catches her breath on a rock just on the pool’s edge, she holds silent and still just as another cave dweller comes sniffing around and walks across her, pausing with his clawed hand on her head and dripping congealed drool on her face. From this point on, Sarah is radicalised.
She stands, torch aflame, dripping in blood, ready to fight her way out or die trying. The worst thing that could happen to her has already happened, she lost the two people she loved most, she is stuck in a cave being hunted, she just watched her friend get eaten and probably choked down a lot of foul blood in that pool. There is nothing left for her to fear.
Blood soaked Sarah is easily one of my favourite images of horror cinema. She becomes pure instinct, evolving herself to best face all the dangers of the cave. Even Juno, who was sleeping with Sarah’s late husband and left their friend Beth (Alex Reid) to die, is not exempt from Sarah’s newfound intuition and calm, decisive wrath.
This film does wondrous things with light and colour. It has gore, eye gouging and skull cracking. All the women in this film are smart and tough, even before the monsters arrive. But I am especially fond of a woman who gets tight lipped, wide eyed and ruthless in her survival, as Sarah does.
So if I’m ever stuck in a cave (which is unlikely because fuck caves forever) and I’m inevitably attacked by bloodthirsty monsters, just know I will be channelling bloody Sarah and willing my heart to keep beating.
Isaura Barbé-Brown is a Hackney born and based actress. She studied at AADA in New York and BADA in Oxford. She has written for The BFI, Black Ballad UK as well as The Final Girls/Bloody Women and been a guest on The Final Girls podcast and the Evolution of Horror podcast. She has done talks at the BFI for their Squad Goals event and during their Love season with the Bechdel Test Fest on race in romantic films. Isaura has also been on panels for BFI Future Film, The Watersprite Film Festival and The Norwich Film Festival. Her acting work covers theatre, film, tv and voiceover. She has also written for short film, TV and theatre as well as short stories and poetry. You can find Isaura on Twitter and Instagram.
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