5. The Descent
Neil Marshall's grueling horror classic The Descent is another picture whose reality is tweaked by different cuts of the film. The American cut has the sole survivor of the monster attack, Sarah escaping the cavern and getting back to the car, and in a truly rubbish DTV sequel she even goes back into the cave and recovers Juno, who's still alive down there. The original British release has the more compelling ending, showing Sarah to have hallucinated her escape, and instead she's still there in the darkness with her daughter holding a birthday cake as the shadows flicker around her and the crawlers scream in the distance. When she blows out the candles, the film ends. Theoretically, then, so does Sarah's self-inflicted Hell, one she's been conjuring up since the death of her husband and daughter. With the original ending taken into consideration, it becomes highly plausible that even the monsters are just figments of Sarah's psychotic break, and that it was she who murdered all her friends, finally confronting the duplicitous Juno and then arriving at the end of her journey, a reconciliation with the daughter she lost. The final scene reminds of Plato's Myth of the Cave, and the shadowy figures and hideous echoes suggest that it is the shadows, not the actual objects, that are real for Sarah. She's the first one to get glimpses of the crawlers, and she's also the one who experiences a bloody baptism of sorts--separating the moment she embraces her feral murderess-- before fighting her way to Juno, who she has unfinished business with. The fact that there's no single attempt at explanation or even foreshadowing why the crawlers are down there is an effective way of leaving this tantalizing possibility an open door, as is the ending, which does establish that Sarah has imagined her escape, and if that, how much more has been the product of a splintered mind?