Film Theory: The Scary Monsters Living Under Your Feet! (The Descent)

[Applause] hello Internet welcome to film theory the show that takes you on an expedition down into the theorists cave of wisdom readjust stalagmite learn something new dreadful speleology puns aside that's the science of studying caves by the way today I want to dust off what is for my money one of the most underappreciated movies in the 21st century of horror canon the descent in an era that didn't have the greatest track record with horror how did your pond get off the bike step away from the bike the descent stood out for it's claustrophobic setting smart characterization and horror that didn't depend solely on monsters popping out to kill you if you haven't seen it the descent is about a group of friends who go on a trip in the Appalachian Mountains to get in on that sweet sweet spelunking action the leader of the group decides that safety and responsibility are lame so she leads the team down into an unexplored section of the caves and wouldn't you know it the entrance promptly collapses trapping them inside someone call Elon Musk up in this his house build these gals a submarine anyway their day goes from bad to worse as the group eventually realizes that they're being hunted by albino cave goblins cold crawlers who are blind and hunt by sound and definitely weren't ripped off exactly by the monsters of a quiet place from that point forward the movie becomes a frantic race in the dark winding caves to escape before everyone becomes a crawler snack the movie was followed three years later by the descent part to a straight-to-dvd sequel which is mostly a retread of the first movie except now there's a scene where the heroes fall into the crawlers toilet and get pooped on which is also pretty much what it feels like to watch the descent part 2 so yeah the sequel not great but the original descent is a solid movie sure the poster is super cheesy like a guess it kind of looks like a skull if you really squint at it but and the art team was really reaching hard for this one but it is a movie that has a little bit of everything that you like about horn tension claustrophobia some gross score and a really frightening monster and it's that last one that I want to focus on today because the crawlers in the descent find this really interesting middle ground as far as horror monsters go they aren't fantasy killers like Freddy Krueger but they're also not very very plausible monsters like the shark from Jaws they're kind of realistic but kinda not they seem like the kind of thing that would be a local legend like Bigfoot or the Blair Witch or the Jersey Devil and so unapologetic theorists an amateur Monster Hunter that I am I wanted to figure out whether the crawlers could actually be real how plausible is it that there are blind albino humanoid hunters living amongst us feeding in the unexplored cave systems right under our feet strap on your headlamps use your inside voices and bring some hand sanitizer in case you fall into a gremlin latrine because we're diving headfirst into the unknowns no no you stop at Disney this is not your theory you have every other movie franchise out there I'm not letting you have this one you had your chance and you decided not to release anything no bad Disney you're on timeout you give me something better than Artemis Fowl and then we'll talk to start our monster hunt we first have to know what exactly we're looking for we get many many good looks at the crawlers over the course of the descent movies so we know for sure that they kind of looked like a mix between Nosferatu and that war monster from that one episode of the x-files but the movies themselves don't actually give us much of an explanation of what they are or where they came from luckily for us though the director the first movie Neil Marshall has gone on record to provide a bit more detail about the crawlers in an interview promoting the release of the first movie Marshall said that quote the crawlers are cavemen that didn't leave the cave they've evolved in this environment over thousands of years and there's a community of them that lived down there in families they've lost their eyesight they have acute hearing and smell and they function perfectly in the pitch-black and quote I uh I gotta be honest that is a lot more comprehensive of an explanation than I was expecting then all of those characteristics are indeed represented across the movies with the possible exception being the one about the acute sense of smell one scene in particular shows a crawler nearly on top of two of the spelunker but because they stay still and stay quiet the crawler doesn't realize they're there which doesn't really make sense if he can actually smell them so maybe not that one but the rest of his statement gives us plenty of stuff to fact-check about cave people sensory evolution cryptids and so forth so could crawlers exist in the real world without us knowing it let's start with issue number one unexplored caves where the crawlers could hide when we think about exploring the world it always seems like that's something that just sort of stopped at some point in the past sure those dummies in the 1500s had no idea about how many continents there were but now we've mapped out the whole place and that's not true it's not true in the slightest truth be told there are tons of unexplored places all over the world and we're still discovering new massive cave systems each and every year here's a giant one in Canada that's been nicknamed the Sarlacc pit that nobody knew existed just two years ago a big cave was discovered in Colorado earlier this year and that's not even considering potential off shooting caves from the ones that we already know exist so the notion that if crawlers existed especially here in the US that we know about them already it just isn't necessarily true these unexplored an undiscovered cave systems aren't even in remote parts of the world where nobody lives depending on where you're watching this video it's possible that there's unexplored cave systems under your feet right now waiting to fall open and expose you to the hungry crawlers underneath don't look down haha major look at your feet issue number two discovering new animal species it's easy to think that if understanding and cataloguing the earth is our homework we've been done for years but that just simply isn't true there were 71 new plant and animal species discovered in 2019 alone some of which were discovered underground and in caves like this spider that worships ants you heard that right and no I'm not gonna explain that just this year there was a new giant cave fish uncovered if cataloging all the living things and places on earth is our homework we're gonna need to pull an all-nighter here folks according to an article by National Geographic some scientists estimate that 86 percent of living organisms on earth still haven't been classified by humankind now it's true that a lot of that 86 percent is likely made up of things like rare fungi and bacteria that only live in volcanoes are weird fish that walk along the bottom of the ocean and look like they're wearing lipstick oh wait we actually did find that one at any rate maybe you think that it's just too unlikely that a large bipedal animal like the crawlers would go undiscovered for this long and for that I turn your attention to almost exactly one year ago today when a new species of ancient human was discovered inside a cave system in the Philippines the homo luzon Ensis thought to have been under 4 feet or 1.2 meters tall and adapted to climbing trees and what are those crawlers in the descent again oh yeah short humanoid hunters living in caves and adept at climbing in 2006 when the Descent first came out these were fictional monsters fourteen years later here in 2020 we have bones and a species name to show that those crawlers might not be so fictitious after all the moral of the story here is that big animals can go undiscovered for a long time especially if they're the type of big animal that kills you when you discover them so let's keep going down this threat say homo lose and Ensis this prototype human is indeed our candidate for what would eventually become the descents crawlers what about their senses as I mentioned before the crawlers are blind if we're saying that the crawlers are essentially these protohumans isn't realistic to believe that a subspecies of human would basically evolve away their eyesight well yeah it is more than plausible there are species of fish and crustaceans that have lost both their pigmentation and their eyesight because they live in caves in caves skin pigment and eyesight are just wasted evolutionary supplies and once you know it those species are found in the Appalachian cave systems the same location that the crawlers haunt in the descent and while totally blind mammals are more rare they do in fact exist as in the case of the star-nosed mole as a side note boy was i relieved to find out that this thing is the size of a hamster because when I first saw close-up of this thing I thought it was here to rip open my face and eat my brain it's like a real-life version of the demagogue and from stranger things so to answer the question of whether protohumans like the homo luzon Ensis could evolve over time to go completely blind develop themselves super and lose all skin pigmentation it is a decided yes homo lose and Ensis has been dated to have existed in those caves fifty thousand to sixty seven thousand years ago which leaves plenty of time to adapt to your surroundings now admittedly scientists are still unsure about the exact genetic mechanisms that lead to blindness and certain animals but there is no doubt that it happens to organisms that previously have those senses given enough time enough darkness enough isolation it is certainly plausible that the crawlers could have evolved that way over tens of thousands of years so then last question what about food one of my initial thoughts was that the crawlers would eventually starve to death because waiting for dumb hikers to stumble town into your unexplored cave ain't a good survival strategy and finding enough food inside of a cave to sustain a human-sized monster would be pretty hard there's a reason Caves are full of small creatures finding tons of insects to feed something like a bat sure not a problem finding enough food to sustain a mini human now that becomes an issue but it's also an issue that the movies disprove for me in the descent part to goblin Boogaloo we see near the end of movie that the crawlers actually hunt above ground particularly on deer and then they drag those kills back into the cave to feast on that means they aren't relying on what's solely inside the cave as a food supply and if they're going after deer well they don't even have to hunt anymore there are approximately a million collisions with deer every year in the United States alone so realistically those crawlers might be cleaning more deer carcasses off the highway than the transportation department so many they might as well get themselves one of those adopt-a-highway sines dedicated to um if the crawlers have a clean water source which caves tend to and can hunt and scavenge under the cover of darkness resources for these guys aren't gonna be that big of a deal so is that it did we just check off all the boxes did I just unintentionally sign myself up to become a crawler truther navigating the caves of Greater Appalachia and apparently also the Philippines in search of modern-day Morlocks stand aside ghost hunters move away Finding Bigfoot it's time for crawler quest to rise up featuring your host literally anyone other than me cuz lord knows ain't squeezing my dad bought into those tiny caves No the real killer of this theory isn't the crawlers themselves it's actually genetics in ecology there's a concept known as minimum viable population or MVP for short that considers how many individual organisms are required for the long-term survival of a species it depends a bit on the type of animal rat and bugs have small MVPs because they can make quickly and often whereas animals like humans with a long juvenile period and fewer reproductive partners have higher MVPs so what is the exact MVP numbers of humans or in this case crawler humans that would need to exist for the population to survive there are some competing theories among scientists who are currently theorizing about our ability to colonize other planets one estimate puts the number at 98 another one puts it at 14000 so um let's hope we knew that number down just a wee bit before we make that big trip to Mars Halloween even if we go with the most bare-bones route and say we need about a hundred crawlers for our homo losin n says to continue on in the cave system it doesn't bode well for them the most we ever see on screen at one time is 9 near the end of the movie and anthropologists believe that cave dwelling Neanderthals only lived in groups between 10 and 30 individuals pretty likely that the crawlers are below the MVP that they need to survive so what would happen in smaller populations well I hope that this soundbite doesn't get taken out of context but the answer is massive inbreeding inbreeding in human populations leads to a number of different problems in the offspring from low birth rates to physical abnormalities to heart failure but there's one side effect of inbreeding that really hurts the chances for crawlers and that's hearing loss studies show much higher rates of deafness in populations with intermarriage and inbreeding so if the crawlers are blind and then going deaf and they also can't smell their prey when they're right on top of them they're just not gonna be able to survive very long it looks like my cave hunting ended before it even began or not you know Finding Bigfoot lasted a hundred episodes and they were just literally wandering around in the woods with night-vision cameras the whole time it was like Blair Witch lame edition so there you have it friends no crawlers in the caves ghosts belong to your it's content without a care in the world except for caves collapsing extreme claustrophobia and giant bat eating centipedes happy caving but hey that's just a theory a film theory and cuts you

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 2,385,829

Rating: 4.9389653 out of 5

Keywords: the descent, monsters, the descent 2, the descent full movie, scary movie, horror movie, scary, horror, animals, bats, extinction, underground, dead meat, the descent movie, scary animals, scary bugs, the descent monster, the descent trailer, the descent ending, caves, spelunking, the descent 2005, the descent explanation.the descent ending explanation, descent ending, descent ending explanation, the film theorists, film theory, matpat, film theory scary, the descent part 1

Id: aIKNqE7mpv8

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SixtySense]

Jeeps Creeps the winged demonic Cryptid is another one I really wonder about as well as Descent and Descent 2..

And Never go Spelunking with your mistress and your wife, it could end very badly for you.