“The Descent” is one of the greatest horror movies to come out of the United Kingdom, blending creature feature scares with claustrophobic tension. The 2005 movie has a group of women go spelunking in a remote and extensive cave system in North Carolina. As the women get lost in the vast underground networks of caverns, they are attacked by carnivorous subterranean creatures who relentlessly hunt them. In the U.S. theatrical ending, sole survivor, Sarah (Shauna MacDonald), sees a vision of Juno (Natalie Mendoza), the woman she left behind to die, before regaining her senses.
The original British version of “The Descent” and unrated cut released on home video in America goes one step further with Sarah’s hallucinations. Rather than coming back to lucidity safely outside the caves, Sarah suffers from an illusion within an illusion, still lost underground. Sarah has a follow-up hallucination, imagining she is reunited with her late daughter (Molly Kayll) as the monsters rapidly approach her. The U.S. ending was an edit requested by its American distributor, Lionsgate, to make the movie less bleak, with filmmaker Neil Marshall obliging the request.
