Trivia for
The Descent (2005) More at IMDbPro »

• The cast members were taken to a rock-climbing center in Derbyshire to help prepare them for filming.
  
  
• The hospital scene contains 30 extras.
  
  
• This film's poster art is borrowed from a portrait photograph by Philippe Halsman of Salvador Dalí, entitled Salvador Dali In Voluptate Mors. (The photo itself was inspired by surrealist Dali's gouache Female Bodies as a Skull painting) This same imagery was also used for the poster for The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
  
  
• Among the bones that Sarah falls into is a wolf's head which came from one of the werewolves from Neil Marshall's previous film Dog Soldiers (2002).
  
  
• According to the audio commentary on the special edition DVD, there was a exact replica made of Nora-Jane Noone and after the movie was finished, she got to keep the head of the doll and put it in her mother's freezer as a joke.
  
  
• As stated in cast commentary on the Special Edition DVD, Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, and Alex Reid did the entire white water rafting sequence on their own without any stunt doubles or special effects.
  
  
• At Neil Marshall's insistence, all the people playing the villainous "crawlers" were professional actors rather than stunt men or dancers. He wanted them to cultivate a distinct character for their crawler, although, in the finished film, many crawlers only appear for a few seconds.
  
  
• The jokey production name given during filming was "Chicks with Picks".
  
  
• No real caves appear anywhere in film, they were all sets built at Pinewood Studios, London created by Production Designer Simon Bowles.
  
  
• Leslie Simpson, who played one of the Crawlers, was actually killed twice on screen. He was the Crawler who's eyes were gauged out by Sarah and the one that Juno beat with a rock.
  
  
• The Danish title for the movie is "Descent into hell".
  
  
• Watch closely during the scene after the cave-in. While the girls are arguing about how to get out, Sarah is moving her flashlight about the chamber. She shines it on a ledge for a fraction of a second as she is moving the light around, and you can can see the shadow or outline of a crawler. When she passes by the ledge again with the flashlight, the shadow is gone, and you can faintly hear a scurrying sound as it is running away.
  
  

• SPOILER: The appearance of the creatures was kept secret from the cast members until the first scene in which they encounter them was filmed. When the cast were finally filming the scene where the girls encounter the crawlers, the girls were genuinely scared and screamed the building down, running off set and laughing.
  
  
• SPOILER: During Sarah's imagined escape in the blue 4x4, Neil Marshall gave the drivers orders to do whatever they could to damage the vehicle. He was unaware that Sam McCurdy (Director of Photography) wanted to buy it after the shoot.
  
  
• SPOILER: There is a shot of a "beasty" much sooner than you think. Not long after they start the descent, in the cave that they light up red, when Sarah hears children's laughter as is checking out where it's coming from, look in the background to her left and you'll see a silhouette.
  
  

Related Links