8 Horror Movies With Surprising Deeper Meanings
2. The Descent Is A Tragedy About Mental Illness
A short plot description of The Descent sounds like your typical horror movie fodder: a girl named Sarah loses her husband and daughter in a car accident. In order to help her cope, her friends conceive the worst plan ever, take Sarah caving on the anniversary of the terrible tragedy. In the cave, some monsters called crawlers begin murdering all of her friends. However, The Descent has much more going on than what is on the surface.
There is a popular fan theory that Sarah is the killer in The Descent and there are no monsters. This theory has traction because before the girls all go spelunking in the middle of rural Tennessee, there is scene that reveals that Sarah is on some heavy anti-psychotics. She does not bring her medication with her on the caving expidition. There are also many visual and audio clues that connect Sarah to the crawlers. Sarah is often framed and blocked the same way as the monsters. There is even a scene where she screams and her scream sounds like the shriek of a crawler to her nearby friends. However, instead of Sarah being the monster, the real monster in this film is mental illness. The cave is Sarah’s mind and the crawlers are her anger and grief.
If you stop taking your medication you will most likely not murder all your friends at the first sign of trouble, but you do lose parts of yourself when you begin to give in to mental illness. In this way, Sarah murdering her friends represents her killing parts of herself, or it could even be symbolic of Sarah’s deteriorating mental health killing her real-life relationships. The movie’s title The Descent is not simply about a descent into a scary cave, but a woman’s descent into mental illness.
While in and out of the cave, Sarah has several hallucinations of her deceased daughter holding a birthday cake. Usually, the cake has five candles on it, likely representing Sarah’s five friends, but in the last scene her daughter’s birthday cake has six candles on it. If the ghost of Sarah's daughter is a representation of her grief slowly chipping away at her life and mental health, then this is her illness winning. She has blown out five of the candles. The sixth and last candle to be snuffed out is herself.
When looked at from the perspective of someone losing their battle with mental illness, The Descent is one of the most heartbreaking horror films ever made.