Actress Shauna Macdonald had less than three months to prepare to battle those pasty crawlers – again – in the sequel to the 2005 horror gem “The Descent.”
That meant hitting the gym, lacing up her running shoes and making sure she could be a worthy foe for those flesh-eating monsters.
“I didn’t want to be self conscious about my fitness or just not able to throw a punch convincingly,“ Macdonald tells WWTW.
It’s not what they teach actors in film school, but at this point Macdonald knows how to excel in an action-packed horror hit.
“The Descent: Part 2,” out April 27, takes up right where the 2005 original left off. Sarah (Macdonald) is coaxed back into those newly discovered caves to help locate her missing friends. Her character can’t remember the events of the past few days, but as soon as the crawlers re-appear it all starts coming back to her. And us.
Macdonald was contractually bound to appear in the sequel, but she says the early drafts skimped on the character development. So she spoke up about it.
“I was really worried,” the Scottish actress says. “I had a lot to lose. The [first] film is great, fantastic. I really wanted to make ’The Descent: Part 2’ as good as, and better, than ‘The Descent.’”
The sequel’s director, Jon Harris, welcomed her feedback.
“The great thing about Jon and the whole process was they actually wanted opinion, they wanted to hear what we were trying to hold on to,“ she says.
The 2005 film caught people’s attention, in part, by using an all-female cast. But Macdonald dismisses the “girl power” talk that followed its release.
“The film isn’t necessarily about a woman’s strength but the strength within people, and the ugly things you do when you‘re really scared, like sacrificing your friends,“ she says, “It’s instinctual. It’s what you do. Even walking down the street at night … if someone goes to mug you, you have no idea what you’ll do.”
“The Descent” franchise might not be an acting showcase, but Macdonald leaned heavily on her craft when scrapping with the crawlers.
The men playing the creatures were primarily gymnasts and dancers asked to threaten the main characters wearing suits slathered jelly.
“There’s comedy value there,” she says of fighting this slick, slippery creatures. “They wear tiny little half thongs so you get a good look at their bottoms.
The sequel’s most draining sequences to shoot involved the excrement pit – although the actress describes it with another, shorter two-word phrase.
“It’s like you’re playing water polo, that sort of exhausting,” she says of battling crawlers while sloshing around in the pit’s viscous fluids. “We all got weird rashes all over our bodies.”
“The Descent” stands as one of the best horror films in recent memory, and Macdonald says some fans resisted the mere notion of a sequel. Some did so in stark terms, according to a random sampling of comments she read on the Internet.
“I felt sad for them that they had enjoyed a film so much, and had ownership of it to a degree that they wouldn’t accept the possibility of continuing the story,” she says. “I just have to not read anything and make the best film possible. I can’t have anything cloud that.”
(Photo: Shauna Macdonald revisits the role of Sarah, the cavern explorer turned heroine, in “The Descent: Part 2.” Lionsgate Home Entertainment)
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