Film Theory: The Crawlers Weren't The REAL Killers In The Descent

We obviously see Sarah at multiple points throughout the movie suffering with her mental health. As the aforementioned visions of her dead daughter reveal, Sarah isn't coping well with the grief of losing her family. She's suffering with PTSD, creating her own image of seeing her daughter Jessica on her fifth birthday, which she never actually made it to. From Sarah waking up in hospital and running out of her room to impending darkness, director Neil Marshall parallels the loss of her sanity alongside her trek into the bowels of the earth, using darkness and light continuously as reflective of how easily life can be snuffed out by the cruelness of fate.

Interestingly, on from this, we see Sarah is on prescribed psychiatric medication in a brief shot of the cabin, paralleling Rebecca's warning of what can happen whilst spelunking if things go wrong:

“You can get dehydration, disorientation, claustrophobia, panic attacks, paranoia, hallucinations, visual and aural deterioration.”

It's arguably the same as what can happen from one not taking medication, of which Sarah doesn't manage to do as it's assumed they'll just be going on a day trip before getting sucked into a living nightmare in the unknown cave system. Her pills aren't with her in the cave and have been purposefully shown on screen at their lodgings, potentially proving that this crawler problem is born from Sarah's distorted mind rather than through natural phenomenon.

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