Aug 31, 2008 03:00 PM
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New details crawl out of the cave for The Descent: Part 2. All of the leaked plot bits have soothed my Crawler-loving soul thus far, but even though Neil Marshall gave his blessing over the the remake directed by Jon Harris, I'm still nervous. Although how can you go wrong with more Crawlers, bigger and better claustrophobic moments and the return of some old faces?
The new Descent sequel takes place right where the original left off with main character Sarah escaping the caves and making her way to civilization, where she is hospitalized. Released afterwards, she joins a rescue team and jumps back into the cave to save whatever survivors are left over. And of course, things go terribly wrong.
Shock Till You Drop visited the Descent 2 set and got an ear full of the best new details on this horror sequel. James Watkins, one of the Descent 2 writers, explained how this movie could be scarier and gorier than the first:
I honestly feel that this film is going to be more violent that the first. I got a skewed sense of things as I'm shooting second unit, I'm shooting all the close-up gore with Paul Hyett's prosthetics. He is a legend, he did my film Eden Lake, he does all Neil's films. So I've been doing close-ups of prosthetics... Gore is pretty straight forward and pretty simple. I think with a really strong horror movie you have to get into the core, it's much more powerful. You have to put gore in there, to give moments for people to cheer about - and there's a ton of that - but if it was just that then it's not enough.
The best scene from The Descent is when the main character Sarah gets wedged between the rocks and has a panic attack - a claustrophobia scare at its best. In the sequel, the crew is trying to recreate that kind of chest-pounding experience, but in water:
Crawlers' heads and somebody getting out a drill and drilling them. For us you have all that fun stuff, but at the same time what I felt was good about the first film was the way in which Neil tapped into the real deep horrors of claustrophobia, abandonment, fear of the dark, the terrifying sequence for me was when Sarah gets stuck and she has her panic attack. For me that's much scarier than any monster stuff. The sequence that Jon and I came up with to top that is to do it with water. Jon and I went on a little trip to Yorkshire and went down a cave with some cave rescue guys and we didn't get very deep at all. It's pretty dangerous. The real extreme cavers do the water stuff. Going into the water not knowing where you're going to come out, I wouldn't even want to do that on the fantastic set Simon has built. For me this is a stand out moment in the film, tapping into really deep primal fears.
Most importantly for fans of the first movie, Juno - the character that Sarah abandoned in the bottom of the dark and creepy cave- is back. According to Shock, the actress who plays Juno, Natalie Jackson Mendoza, is on set and back in action. Please, please, please have her gone stark raving mad with fear, or even better, gone native and become the leader of the Crawlers.
Send an email to Meredith, the author of this post, at meredith@io9.com.
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