Favorite Movie Fright

by Dr. Michael Robinson

Movie poster for The Descent (2005) retrieved from imdb.com

The Descent (2005) ranks as one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. My favorite fright from the movie did not so much come from the movie as it did from the viewers. 

For the unfamiliar, The Descent is a claustrophobic horror movie written and directed by Neil Marshall. Sometime after a personal tragedy strikes one of its members, a group of female friends reunite to go on an adventure holiday together. Their exploration of a cave in the Appalachian Mountains is disturbing enough with its tight spaces and unsafe conditions. But then the friends discover they are not alone in the cave system. And that’s when the absolute terror starts. 

The movie is outstanding. Its cast of female leads makes it unusual, even for a genre that often favors women as main characters. The initial horror of being trapped underground gives way to a terrifying fight for survival in the film. The movie was also famous for having a different ending in the United States than overseas. 

The greatest shock I got from the movie was heightened by the circumstances in which my wife and I viewed the film. At the time, we had a big-screen TV, but this was back before large-screen TVs became giant rectangles on walls. No, this thing was a beast that weighed a million tons (I know because I moved it a few times). My wife had won it in a contest, and we loved that gigantic television. 

We watched on my old sofa, a very comfortable piece of furniture I had purchased at an Amish furniture gallery because it was “exactly one Mike long” and, therefore, perfect for sleeping/napping. My wife sat on the left side against the armrest, her legs covered up with a blanket because she felt cold. I was on the right side. And joining me was one of our cats. Sheba was a sweetheart who loved nothing in the universe more than sitting in my lap (in fact, she would often jump into my lap before I could completely sit down). 

My wife is pretty tough. She is not a screamer per se, but she can scream in a terrifying way. In fact, she once got a discount on a Halloween costume by screaming loudly. The store thought it was a clever gimmick, but my wife’s piercing scream shocked many people in the mall.  

However, when our main characters discover that they are not alone in the caves, my wife lets out quite a shout. I don’t blame her. It is a masterfully constructed scare that I will not spoil here. She also kicked her legs in surprise. That sent the blanket off her feet and into the air at about the height of the TV set itself. 

Humans are closer to our primate past than we like to think. We have deeply rooted fight-or-flight reactions from an evolutionary time not so long ago, in which we could and would sometimes be eaten by large cats or other things. This hair-trigger alarm system kept us alive then and sometimes keeps us alive today. 

But in this case, a primitive part of my brain told me the impossible. Misreading the blanket’s proximity to the screen, that ancient fear center thought that the creature on the screen had exited the screen. I know, it sounds ridiculous. And it was, but for the split second that irrational fear got me, I shouted, too. 

Luckily, reason immediately filled the gap that mistaken fear had hollowed out in my mind. I remembered that there was a cat on my lap, and I was wearing shorts. So, in order to avoid having my legs shredded by her panicked all-claws retreat, I clamped down on Sheba in my lap. 

We paused the movie, and my wife and I laughed. Then I realized I was still holding poor Sheba girl like a vise. Her eyes had gotten so big in panic that you could hardly see the color of her iris. I apologized profusely for terrifying my cat and then stood up to set her down. 

Unbeknownst to anyone else in the room, Lenny, our orange tough male cat, had come down the stairs to see what was happening. He’d slipped around the sofa’s edge and stood beside where I set Sheba. 

Sheba freaked out and jumped at least three feet straight up into the air. And still frazzled, I went right up in the air with her. 

I’m not sure Sheba enjoyed any of it, but we humans got a good laugh out of that… once we settled down.