The Descent's Terrifying Jump Scare Caused Chaos Behind The Scenes

Learning cool behind-the-scenes trivia about some of my favorite movies, even decades after they've been released, is one of my simple pleasures. Neil Marshall's "The Descent" — likely the most intense and terrifying survival horror ever made — is certainly on the list, and there's no better time than this year to revisit its "making of" as the film celebrates its 20^th anniversary. There are myriad of reasons why it's Marshall's singular masterpiece to this day — from its simple yet effective script to its immaculate pacing to the monster design to practical effects to sneaky jump scares — but the latest one given to us in the new Empire issue (which reunited some of the cast) is that the writer-director purposely hid the Crawlers from the all-female cast for most of the shoot. His goal? Getting genuine screams and panic in that first encounter.

If you've seen the film (and you should), you'll probably never forget the night vision scene where the women discover the bones of dozens of dead animals in the cave, and that they aren't alone down there. To say that Marshall pulled it off is an understatement, but at first, the disturbing sequence didn't really go as planned. Asking the director if he chose this method specifically to ramp up the suspense, he said:

"Maybe too much! When we finally had them meet, it was a scene in the pitch darkness, and we sneaked Craig Conway [who played lead Crawler, Scar] in for the shot, thinking we'd get a genuine reaction. Which we absolutely did, but it was too genuine. Everybody turned around, screamed and ran off the set."

To give you the full picture of what that nightmarish sequence felt like from the other side, some of the film's stars recalled how it all went down. Saskia Mulder (who played Rebecca) said, "We'd been given one note, which was to react authentically but to stay within frame. But we all threw our hands in the air, and were running to the other side of the building. They were absolutely terrifying." Shauna Macdonald (whose Sarah came the closest to the movie's lead) added, "That was the scariest thing. We did montage sequences where Neil was like, "Okay, guys, so just walk through this tunnel," and we were like, "Why? Why? What's there?!"

All these bits are testaments to how exceptional "The Descent" really was in the mid-aughts, and how it still feels like that today. It's just painstaking and methodical filmmaking — visceral, gooey, and claustrophobic in a way that specifically caters to horror lovers. The type of intelligent creature feature that's nearly impossible to replicate on the same level these days, and in the last two decades, very few flicks have come even close. Kind of a shame that Marshall was never able to follow it up with something similarly impressive ("Doomsday," "Centurion," and "Hellboy" all paled in comparison, technically or otherwise) since he clearly had a unique vision and approach to the genre. Either way, "The Descent" will forever be a classic that we can always return to when craving that deep-seated and intoxicating thrill.