‘I was being leapt at by a really scary man, basically naked’ … Shauna Macdonald in the 2005 horror. Photograph: 1996-98 AccuSoft Inc., All rights reserved/Pathe View image in fullscreen ‘I was being leapt at by a really scary man, basically naked’ … Shauna Macdonald in the 2005 horror. Photograph: 1996-98 AccuSoft Inc., All rights reserved/Pathe How we made Film ‘The eye-gouging was very, very satisfying’: how we made cave horror classic The Descent ‘The child crawler whose head I crush with my boot was only 11, bless him. It was actually me stamping on a cauliflower’
Prefer the Guardian on Google Neil Marshall, writer/director I was introduced to Christian Colson at Celador Films off the back of [2002 horror film] Dog Soldiers, and I pitched them a project – actually a feature-length version of my student graduation film – about zombies on an oil rig. They liked it but said it was too expensive, so on the train back to Newcastle I was asking myself what would make a really scary horror film that could be contained and so made on a budget. I was thinking of things set in the dark and was like, well … caves . At the back of my mind was a school trip to a lead mine where the guide had said, “OK, everybody, turn your lights off” and, for the first time, I experienced a darkness that I just couldn’t fathom.
We wanted the film to feel as realistic as possible: when you’re caving, the only lights you have are what you take with you. There are no beautiful shafts of light making everything look pretty. It meant having huge portions of the screen in total darkness, so only when a character turns around and shines a light you finally see what’s in the shadows.
Alex said her lines with an ice pick through her neck. Then I caved her head in with a stone Darkness was definitely my friend, but it did mean a lot of planning because each character had to have something they could light the scene with, even if it was just a box of matches. Sam McCurdy, the director of photography, and I discussed lighting sources that we could potentially use, and I structured the film around who had which light at which time. This gave us a lighting scheme: if you’re with the fire, it’s Sarah. If it’s a torch, it’s Juno.
There isn’t a single real cave in the whole film. It was a mixture of amazing sets by Simon Bowles, a couple of matte paintings and a miniature set built by Leigh Took – the water pouring down the waterfall wasn’t water, it’s salt.
For the crawlers, I wanted something very basic-looking, not too many lines or details. The challenge was how to make them scary but keep them human, because the notion is that these are the cavemen who stayed in the cave rather than those who left the dark and started building cabins in the open. Visually they were a hybrid of Nosferatu and Iggy Pop, but movement-wise I thought we should make them like spiders – the way they’ll stop and be perfectly still before suddenly going off at 100 miles an hour and then stopping again.
I conceptualised the film as Sarah’s descent into being this primal savage: her undergoing a rebirth in order to survive, even though you’re not sure she’s going to be able to go back to society afterwards.
View image in fullscreen ‘I was being leapt at by a really scary man, basically naked’ … a crawler in The Descent. Photograph: Pathe Shauna Mac donald, played Sarah This was the era of FHM, Loaded and all those lads’ mags, so I initially thought it was going to be girls looking sexy in tigh…