The Descent

Upon finishing The Descent, I found myself greatly appreciating how it handles a great deal of social anxieties. 

Firstly, the unknown. I found this aspect of the film particularly horrifying and relevant because the unknown is inherently the most frightening thing imaginable. Jaws is only scary because we do not know when the shark is going to show up and we cannot see it, if the shark was more visible than it really would not be that good. The creatures in the film are an undiscovered species, and nothing is known about them except that they must have evolved to survive in the cave. 

Another aspect is feminism and motherhood. Sarah loses her daughter at the beginning of the film yet she is still strong enough to decide to go on this adventure. However, she still frequently dreams about her daughter and even has an auditory hallucination at one point hearing her voice. This suggests that the monsters themselves could be hallucinations, and I believe this to be the case because of Juno. When she “accidentally” kills Sarah’s friend and then Sarah finds her later, the discrepancies just do not add up. Her friend should have died on impact and it seems to suggest all is not as it seems and Juno may have committed murder instead of manslaughter.

Oddly enough, I found some similarities to Fight Club. Now, this may sound incredibly far-fetched (cave monsters vs soap?) but the way the narrator in Fight Club hallucinates Tyler Durden is incredibly similar to the way Sarah may be hallucinating (if the film is a hallucination that is). The only difference is that Fight Club is much more explicit with its ideas of hallucinations, whereas it is entirely possible The Descent had no hallucinations from Sarah up until the very end with Juno in the car. Yet, I believe the film to be a gradual descent into madness which is why she starts to hallucinate far into the film, because she has already gone insane