Stories by Eve Tushnet

YOU WILL GO DOWN IN DARKNESS BEFORE YOU DIE: Wow, I loved The Descent. It is one of the scariest modern movies I can name. So here are comments. Spoilers.

First, caving is one of the very, very few sports about which I have positive memories. As a dyke, I make a very good fag! But no... I've canoed Class Four [ETA: or maybe three?] rapids, and also spelunked (in the John Brown caves, if memory serves), so the whole setup of this movie really worked for me. I was amazed at how perfectly this movie captured dialogue between women friends. The tensions, ambiguities, spikes--this is how girls talk.

Similarly, the caves I've been in are all in Dixie. This movie was so startling because it highlighted the Southern angle, and even brought a few Southern-horror cliches into play, without ever feeling fake. The Scottish cast made Appalachia foreign without the usual creepy class-based superiority.

The jump scares are perfect. I've seen the initial jump scare four times now, and I still cringe and cover my mouth.

I'm... conflicted about the basic idea of the movie, which we find out something like an hour into the flick. On the one hand, it makes the idea of being trapped in the caves vastly more frightening than it would be if the only danger were death. On the other hand, it's filmed as sf-horror, where the cavedwellers are the Other. And that isn't vastly interesting to me.

ETA: No, thinking it over the next day, actually I think the cavedwellers work really well. The shift from horror primarily about being trapped in the cave to horror primarily about being trapped in the cave with these things is seamless. (And a nice parallel to the Sarah vs. Juno horror of being trapped in a cave with a woman you deeply mistrust, or one whom you've betrayed, attempted to make amends to [I think Sarah's very harsh assessment of Juno's motives isn't accurate], and managed to betray yet again.) Not sure why I was vaguely negative about this aspect of the movie when I went to write it up last night.

In a related note, the women are all incredible. They're real and distinctive. Why not push even harder on the possibility that, as the cavedwellers evolved to meet the cave conditions, these women might be forced to become the next generation of cavewomen?

But yeah... this movie is so beautifully-paced, so full of rich characterization, so loving of its girls... and so relentless in their destruction. I remember wriggling through wormhole caves in total darkness, being able to do that without too much terror. I remember saying, "Hey no, I won't actually go on a zipline over a huge freaking chasm, I may be 13 but I know by now that my palms won't stay dry for the whole time needed to keep me from actually dying here, in the dark, in a cave." I sat beside a camp counselor for the next few hours and told her stories. I never forgot that feeling of self-protection and failure. The Descent is about the girls who would never have feared the way I feared. You could argue that it's about a kind of person I admire, yet could never be.

The Descent is about the total destruction of that brave personality. Nothing helps; nothing wins.