10 Horror Movies That Embarrassed Other Movies Released At The Same Time

Caves have never been an attractive venue for filmmaking, thanks to the lack of natural light and the related difficulty in staging believably lit scenes; nor have they made particularly exhilarating subject matter, for obvious reasons. But, for a little while in the mid-late noughties, they were everything.

US-produced subterranean horror The Cave arrived late in the summer of 2005, following a group of spelunkers (thank you, Batman) who get trapped in a Romanian cave system, where they are overcome by a pack of vicious pre- or post-human creatures.

If this plot seems familiar, that's because it first crossed our retinas in the British indie horror The Descent a couple of months earlier. While the films were shot and released too close together to have copied each other, they bear such a similarity within such a niche subject area that they were competing for the same viewers from the get. But there was one clear winner.

Defying convention with an all-female cast and delivering an innovative approach to shooting in darkness, The Descent pulled in $57,000,000 against a $7,000,000 budget, leaving The Cave, which failed to make back its wasted $30,000,000 budget, cold, ashamed and alone in the dark.