THE DESCENT">A Sense of an Ending in THE DESCENT

First, as this is just all about the end of THE DESCENT, then, yep, it’s just chock full of spoil­ers. So stop here if:

• you’ve not seen it
• you’re going to see it
• and you don’t like to know how a thing’s going to end

Not mean­ing to say THE DESCENT has a gimmick-ending or any­thing — we don’t change per­spec­tive and slowly become aware that these are just action fig­ures in a toy bin. But the two end­ings it does have, in being at odds with each other, are also kind of polar­iz­ing the hor­ror audi­ence one way or the other, it seems.

To sum up before­hand: whereas the ‘edited-down’ US end­ing has Sarah dis­able Juno — both as pun­ish­ment for acci­den­tally killing one of their crew and for pos­si­bly hav­ing had an affair with Sarah’s dead hus­band (before he died), to say noth­ing of how leav­ing Juno there focuses the crawlers on Juno, giv­ing Sarah time to sneak away — then crawl up to day­light, stumble-run to her lit­tle Bronco II, blast off down a dirt road then finally pull over for a good cry, where the ‘ghost’ of Juno can jack in the box up from the pas­sen­ger seat, the UK ver­sion goes a step fur­ther: with a clos­ing shot of Sarah ‘pro­ject­ing’ her birth­day girl/dead daugh­ter in the cave with her (thus ‘clos­ing’ the can­dles & cake motif that’s been going on), we under­stand that every­thing since dia­bling Juno has been wish­ful think­ing, pretty much, on Sarah’s part. The crawl to day­light never hap­pened, the jouncy Bronco ride, Juno in the pas­sen­ger seat, none of it. It was all just a man­i­fes­ta­tion either of her crazi­ness or an expres­sion of the type of ‘vision’ peo­ple are sup­posed to have at the moment of their death, when they think they’re actu­ally liv­ing, actu­ally get­ting away. But of course, as the final shot of that UK cut reveals, this is it for Sarah: the crawlers are com­ing in from all angles here, and the daughter’s not really here. All we’re really glad for it that she’s found a happy place in her head.

For those of you haven’t seen this UK end­ing, it’s on Youtube.

Any­way, which is the stronger end­ing, right?

In spite of Amer­i­can audience’s gen­eral intol­er­ance of ambigu­ous HAUTE TENSION type end­ings, still, the UK end­ing seems to be the more pop­u­lar (two excep­tions to this would be JACOB’S LADDER and THE USUAL SUSPECTS, each of which pull the car­pet out at the end in a way the Amer­i­can audi­ence kind of liked). Rather than try to ascribe or guess at motives for this, I think it’s prob­a­bly a bit more worth­while to sim­ply com­pare what’s going on with each of these endings.

With the US cut, what we get is the Mar­i­lyn Cham­bers (TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE) pat­tern, of one ragged sur­vivor being ‘reborn’ into day­light, all that. Only, by insert­ing Juno into that truck, what we under­stand then — if we can dis­al­low that Juno’s a lit­eral ghost, in a story that’s had no ghosts so far — is that, even though Sarah’s over­come her grief, finally, by killing Juno, still, the price of that is some pretty seri­ous guilt. Which is a very nice, quiet lit­tle esca­la­tion right at the end, and even allows us to end on a scream.

With the UK cut, as it includes the US cut, of course we get the same thing, but with the added benefit/twist that UNDERTOW, say, has con­di­tioned us for: the main char­ac­ter find­ing her ‘happy’ place at the end. Which is nice too, as it takes apart our already ripped-apart sense of relief that at least Sarah has dealt with her grief. That she’s still imag­in­ing her­self with her dead daugh­ter sug­gests that her grief has never left — that noth­ing so easy as a cave full of crawlies can cure her. Which is nice, as it lends some dig­nity to grief, I think, while at the same time tak­ing apart that ridicu­lous idea in hor­ror that even one per­son could sur­vive that many mon­sters. So, by using ‘fan­tasy’ to make the movie finally less ‘fan­tas­tic,’ it amps the scare-level up — makes it more real.

Still, though, even though I almost always go for the HAUTE TENSION kind of twists at the ends of things, I think the UK cut of THE DESCENT is the weaker of the two ver­sions here.

To under­stand why, we have to go back to that AMITYVILLE HORROR remake, a movie with plenty of really and truly star­tling imagery, the kind that catches you off-guard time and again, even though you know it’s com­ing. Which is of course what we want from hor­ror, I think. But there’s a point in there where there’s a very impor­tant betrayal, which shat­ters the illu­sion. It’s when the father is in the bath­room by him­self, at the mir­ror. Up to this point, all the ghosts and appari­tions we’ve seen on-screen have been, if not locked into his POV, then at least shot over his shoul­der to sug­gest that, like Jack in THE SHINING, these are all just pro­jec­tions of his grow­ing mad­ness. And that’s great, and ter­ri­fy­ing. In that bath­room, how­ever, there’s a point where he looks in the mir­ror and the cam­era sweeps around to reveal that, over his shoul­der, look­ing at the side of his head or some­thing, is a demon-thing. Which is to say we can no longer run under the assump­tion that he’s an updated Jack; now we have to acknowl­edge that these haunt­ing are specif­i­cally exte­rior to him. Which is to say the cam­era, then, wasn’t emo­tion­ally or in any other way meant to iden­tify with the char­ac­ters on-screen, but was instead serv­ing to cue us into cer­tain things about the house. Which, I think, at least in a movie that’s not been trad­ing in that, is a betrayal, and makes the thing on-screen sud­denly just a movie, no longer some­thing that can or should scare us.

This, I think, is the mis­take the UK cut of THE DESCENT makes, though to a lesser degree (and, as it’s at the end, where the rules can and often do change [espe­cially in hor­ror], in a safer place as well). Whereas the US cut ties things up nicely, with Sarah’s guilt, the UK cut attempts to embed that guilt within the con­text of a fantasy/projection. Which, I’m not sug­gest­ing that in the UK ver­sion Sarah would feel no guilt. What I am sug­gest­ing is that Juno jack-in-the-boxing up from the pas­sen­ger seat like that is pure jump­scare, for us, the audi­ence. And the rea­son I say that is that she doesn’t take that guilt out with her to the ‘real’ world of the cave. Granted, you could argue that what that guilt does is drive her cata­tonic, into her dary­dream, all that, or that she drops into her day­dream and then the guilt rises and messes it up, but still, and I really think this is impor­tant, in the cave she’s just as serene and happy and unbur­dened with guilt as can be (another read, I sup­pose, would be that she’s com­mit­ting sui­cide to pun­ish her­self for what she’s done to Juno, but then what that does is take apart all this ‘per­sonal devel­op­ment’ she’s just achieved).

So, what I’m say­ing, I guess, is that, as-is, I think the US end­ing is stronger, as it doesn’t betray itself as a movie and thus decon­struct the scare. Take the Juno-ghost from the pas­sen­ger seat of the Bronco in the UK cut, how­ever, and I’m per­fectly at ease with that end­ing. I just don’t think it’s pos­si­ble to have both.

As for my take on the rest of THE DESCENT, it pretty much rocked. Like the posters and ban­ners all said, the best creature-driven hor­ror since ALIEN, and some of the best hor­ror we’ve seen for a while now. My only com­plaint, I sup­pose, would be that at a cer­tain point the crea­tures got thick enough to be not so believ­able any­more. I’d have much rather have had just a fam­ily of four or six of them, doggedly chas­ing these women through the halls of their ances­tral ‘home.’ What you get with fewer mon­sters, then, is mon­sters that are more hardy, that don’t die with just the tap of an axe. Or, it’s like that movie DARKNESS (which has one of the bet­ter ‘twist’ end­ings of the last decade, I’d say), with all the kiddie-ghosts shad­ow­ing around in all the back­grounds. When it was just a kid or two, man, yeah, there was some ter­ror. In the the­ater I saw it in, though, when we got to that one scene where the cam­era switches from a front angle on Anna Paquin stand­ing in a def­i­nitely ‘haunted’ room to a rear angle, and we look over the heads of just a throng of ghost-kids, some guy a few rows up summed up the audience’s feel­ings per­fectly: “Goddamn…” And we all laughed — not the tension-releasing kind of laugh you want in a taut story, but the kind of laugh that says that this has stepped over the line now, and’s get­ting a bit ridicu­lous. THE DESCENT, while it never got ridicu­lous, I don’t think, still, it took apart the scare some when we started know­ing that there was a thick enough pop­u­la­tion of these crawlers that there def­i­nitely was going to be one around the next cor­ner, and the next, and hang­ing from the ceil­ing, etc^*. What I’m say­ing is that it’s the empty rooms that scare us, not the full ones. The stuff we imag­ine on the walls, that’s where the ter­ror is.

Talk­ing just pure ter­ror, though, that scene early on in THE DESCENT, when that tube of tun­nel shifts, block­ing them in–if there’s been a more claus­tro­pho­bic scene in film, I don’t think I’ve seen it. And, yeah, it would have been nice to work a lit­tle more of that ‘shift­ing’ in, I should think–if it’s scary by itself, wouldn’t it be espe­cially scary with a crawler some­where on your backtrail?

^{* As to how SCARY MOVIE 29 will spin this, I don’t know. I’d sug­gest, instead of zombie-looking crawlers, maybe some old­time min­ers’ para­keets that’ve been lick­ing the spe­cial rock for too long, and are not only huge and toothed and hun­gry, but have learned to use their whis­tles for ecolo­ca­tion. Though, yeah, that’s a full two steps away, instead of the one step the SCARY MOVIE series usu­ally takes. What I’d guess, then, would be some flap­pers and boot­leg­gers who got caught in a cave-in, and have gone blind over the years, but had enough unla­belled alchohol around that they don’t really care, either. With some duelling ban­jos in the back­ground, of course.}

Posted: 08|21|06 at 7:10 pm. Filed under: Main.

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