"There's Something Down Here...": The Descent and Fears of the Archaic Mother
I just started rock climbing at my university gym so I figured, why not address my fear of heights, darkness and small spaces by exploring a film where a bunch of women go rock climbing and the horrors that ensue? That’s how we arrive at The Descent , Neil Marshall’s trauma drama about a group of women who go caving and find themselves on the wrong end of darkness, cave-ins and did I mention albino man-monsters? If you remember my post on Dog Soldiers last month, Neil likes to place women and their bodies at the center of horror, and while The Descent stars an all female cast, the same is true of this film. Instead of fears of the abject female body represented in the werewolf, Marshall uses the cavernous imagery of the cave to represent fears of descending back into the womb of the archaic mother. According to Barbara Creed, the “ ‘archaic mother’ represents woman as sexual difference ” and she is present “in all horror films as the blackness of extinction…a force that threat...