Neil Marshall achieved something very rare when he directed Dog Soldiers: a successful low-budget British horror movie. There aren’t that many. He’s back this year to try and repeat that success with his new film, The Descent, based around some cavers trapped in a cave system under the Appalachian Mountains. Added to the usual perils of caving (cave-ins, drowning, getting lost) are ‘crawlers.’ These are ‘humans evolved or devolved to live underground; they’re the cavemen who didn’t leave the cave… They’ve lost their eyesight; they’ve got some kind of sonar ability like bats have; they have attuned smell; their teeth have evolved to be better for killing and ripping raw flesh; they are great at climbing,’ to use Marshall’s own words. It makes for an interesting premise. I’m not a horror fan.
What I found interesting in the interview he did for Timeout were his comments regarding why he chose to make the film in the UK and his thoughts on the horror industry. When asked why he made The Descent in the UK he replies:
It was absolutely because that’s what I wanted to do, and that’s what I still want to do. I have no need to up sticks, go off to LA and do that whole thing. There are so many films I want to make here, and I’m not going to help the British film industry by deserting it. The offers didn’t come flooding in after Dog Soldiers because, however well received it was over there - and it’s got a healthy internet following, it never actually got a theatrical release so the studios didn’t take it seriously at all. That’s why that didn’t happen and that’s fine, I didn’t have any problem with that. I wasn’t going to get handed anything really substantial off the back of Dog Soldiers, it would have been Scary Movie 5 or something like that, which didn’t really appeal.
I find it a little odd that Hollywood ignored Dog Soldiers even though it didn’t get a cinema release, one look at it would have convinced most studio execs he knew what he was doing, which strikes me as short-sighted. I also like to see he is keen to stand by the British film industry. There are plenty of British film-makers out there, but many of them are making American films in the US. That’s no bad thing as long as they come back and make British films too, but many don’t. There are probably good reasons for this and maybe the industry should be asking itself why it’s best film-makers spend their time abroad.
When asked about the state of the horror industry, Marshall replies:
Well, at the moment it seems like horror films are sustaining the British film industry, which is a bizarre state of affairs, though not necessarily a bad one as long as it doesn’t remain that way for too long. I think that the problem at the moment is that the market is a little overcrowded with horror.
This isn’t the first quote from Marshall about the British horror films. I caught an article in the Guardian where he mentioned that the UK Film Council has now started funding low-budget horror. Not so unusual until you consider that Marshall says he had previously been told they didn’t fund horror as they ‘[weren’t] really part of the culture of the British film industry’. That’s why Dog Soldiers is so unusual and why there are so few British low-budget horror films, even fewer quality ones and even less successful ones.
I’m not a horror fan, as I said, but if Marshall can continue to make good films in the UK and encourage other talented people to stay, it can only be a good thing and I wish him luck.
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