So is Neil Marshall’s The Descent the best horror film (I’ve seen) since Sadako crawled out of a TV in 1998? It may very well be. Wonderfully simple in its setup (and narrative: six women in a cave, and they’re not alone), The Descent is a masterpiece of unrelieved tension and claustrophobia. (The fact that the viewer is plunged in almost total darkness during three-quarters of the film helps.)
To people who don’t usually watch horror films — and unfortunately, I have a number of friends who simply bypass the genre altogether — it’s hard to push other people to view it. The other night I was having dinner with friends and I was babbling on and on about how great a film it was and that I had seen it twice and wanted to see it again, and that I highly recommend it, etc., etc.:
Gladys: I don’t like horror movies. Is there something else I would get out of it?
me [too quickly]: Not really.
Gladys: Oh.
me [scrambling]: Well… there’s a subtext of feminist empowerment in the film.
At this point Oscar jumps in with “You’re working this table!” and the spell, if it was woven at all, was broken. (Oscar and I were the only guys.) But as fatuous as that may sound, the sight of strong women kicking ass — with the unofficial leader, a Pinay, at that — looked pretty good on screen.
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If I were pressed to pick, these would be my top five favorite “horror” films in chronological order (how odd that three of them came out the same year):
- Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963)
- William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973)
- Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973)
- Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973)
- Hideo Nakata’s The Ring (1998)
(Runners-up, in no order: E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face, Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls, Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Tod Browning’s Freaks, and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby.)
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