Below and THE DESCENT
Cave Dwellers Challenge Women’s Will To Live
There are a plenty of reasons caves can be scary places such as navigating through tight, claustrophobic spaces in pitch-black darkness and the possibility of getting lost or stuck all alone. Along with the biggest fear of all, the unknown--you never what else might be in that cave with you. For the women of THE DESCENT (2005) and Below (Ghoulish Books, March 2022) it just happens to be blood thirsty grotesque almost human like creatures. That’s just one of the similarities between these two underground adventures.
Written and directed by Neil Marshall, THE DESCENT follows a group of six women on a cave exploring trip a year after one friend, Sarah (Shauna Mcdonald), has lost her husband and daughter in a car accident. Things take a turn for worse when their passage back to the entrance collapses behind them and they find out they are not in the mapped cave system they’d planned to visit. As the women explore further searching for another way out, they are attacked by strange creatures occupying the cave. Not all the women survive as they are forced to fight their way out.
Below is the third book by Laurel Hightower, at a little over a hundred pages it’s a quick and fast paced read. It starts with Adelia “Addy” Treadway as she is driving through West Virginia to meet her friends at a horror convention. After a strange incident on the road, she stops to collect herself at rest stop where she meets a trucker, Mads, who offers to help guide her through a late-night snowstorm.
Her anxieties over the long, lonely, and hazardous drive are eased by the company on the road and Mads storytelling over the CB radio. When an accident causes his truck to go off the side of a bridge and crash into the valley below, Addy feels obligated to help. After climbing down, she realizes there is mysterious creature stalking her and she runs into a dark tunnel to escape it. Once in the tunnel she can’t find her way back to the entrance, instead she travels deeper into an underground cave and more danger.
While the underground cave and the creatures are the most obvious similarity, the underlying themes of loss and grief are also major elements to both these stories. At the beginning of the movie, Sarah loses her husband and daughter in an accident. Most of the action takes place a year later and it’s clear she’s still in the grieving process. While Addy’s situation is a bit different, she’s divorced, she is still going through the process of adjusting to life without her husband. But it’s also more complicated than that. Leaving her marriage has made her realized how much it changed her and she’s grieving the woman she was before. Also, while the details leading up to it differ, the catalyst for their stories is a reunion with a group of friends as a way to cope with their loss.
Another obvious similarity is the focus on one woman’s fight for survival, literally and figuratively. While THE DESCENT starts off with a group of women ultimately the story is about Sarah. The movie focuses on her loss and grief. When separated from the group she is forced fight the creatures and find a way out of the cave alone.
Again, in the book, we see Addy fighting literal monsters and struggling to find a way out of the cave. But her biggest battle is with herself. Throughout the book she lectures herself for her actions, hearing the words and voice of her ex-husband in her head. After becoming so reliant on him, she doesn’t believe she can handle life’s difficulties on her own. Despite her lack of confidence, she continually steps up because it’s essential for her survival. Both women call up an unknown strength in order to survive.
Lastly, both can be read as a version of the mythological journey to the Underworld. They start with an entrance similar to the underground caves.
As the characters travel through the Underworld, they are faced with challenges that test their strength, will and faith. If they survive, they’ll return to the land of the living, symbolic of a rebirth. Usually, they are strengthened by the trials or gain a new perspective of the world and their place in it. In the final scenes of THE DESCENT, Sarah escapes the cave by climbing out of a small hole in the ground; an image that closely resembled a birth. In Below, Addy was drastically changed by her experience, she’s more assertive and seems surer of herself. Forced to fight for their lives through an underground hell these two women came out transformed with renewed strength and will to live.
