The Descent

The "crawlers" were designed to resemble Nosferatu from the film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922). They also had huge white eyes to begin with, but this idea was done away with because they looked too silly. It took three and a half hours in makeup to transform an actor into a "crawler." They had to shave off their body hair as well.

(at around 46 mins) The cave drawings featured a woolly rhinoceros which lived in Eurasia. None have been found in North America. They lived during the Pleistocene epoch (1,808,000 to 11,550 years before present) and are known mainly through cave drawings. Recent carbon dating has shown that populations may have survived as recently as 8000 B.C. in Western Siberia. A nearly complete specimen was also found in a tar pit in Starunia, Poland. The oldest known cave paintings are approximately 40,000 years old.

The creature's snarling sound can be heard at the end of the credits.

SPOILER: The endings of the US and UK versions differ. In the end, Sarah wakes up at the bottom of the cave, crawls out, and makes her way back to the car. When she is driving away, she pulls over and vomits, and when she leans back into the car, she is startled by the ghost of Juno sitting in the passenger seat. The US version cuts to the credits here. In the UK version, this apparition causes Sarah to wake up for real at the bottom of the cave, revealing her escape to be just a dream. She then has a vision of her daughter's birthday cake, which we see is just her torch. The camera backs out, the voices of the creatures can be heard again and are increasing in strength as they are closing in on her, and the movie ends. This ending was considered "too dark" for US audiences.

Featured in British Film Forever: Magic, Murder and Monsters: The Story of British Horror and Fantasy (2007)