A horror movie set underground is bound to be a frightening experience. The close quarters, dark conditions, and unidentifiable sounds slithering unseen are a winning formula for frights. Monsters, ghouls, and maniacs all have a habit of lurking underground, and being trapped down there with them with almost no hope of escape is a sure way to get audiences on the edge of their seats.
There are countless examples of underground horror, including recent releases causing some awards buzz.Whether it’s labyrinthiancatacombs, previously undiscovered monsters or terrifying basement people, these are some great horror films that take place underground.
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The Descent
When it comes to subterranean horror movies,The Descentfrom 2005 often tops best-of lists. Directed by Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers) and starring Shauna Macdonald as Sarah Carter, along with Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, MyAnna Buring, Saskia Mulder, and Nora-Jane Noone,The Descentfollows 6 women as they embark on a cave dive. Once they have entered the cave through a narrow passage, it immediately collapses behind them, leaving them trapped with the only option to forge ahead and find another exit.
As they venture deeper, it becomes clear to the women thatthey are not alone in the cave, and that the cave itself is vaster and deeper than they thought. Juno has brought them to an uncharted cave instead of a previously explored one and that decision leads to a grisly end for many of the group. Horrific, pale, and monstrous humanoid creatures lurk in the cave, and they soon begin stalking the group and picking them off in visceral and violent ways. Along with the terror, there is plenty of human drama to punctuate the thick tension.
Creep
2004s’Creep, not to be confused with Mark Duplass’s insane 2014 film of the same name, takes place in the tunnels of the London Underground. Christopher Smith (Triangle)directs Franka Potente as Kate, a young German woman who becomes trapped in a tube train late at night with a would-be rapist co-worker. The train stops, the lights go off and her co-worker attacks her, only to be dragged off by someone or something unseen.
Fleeing the train, Kate finds people in the abandoned station but instead of the help she needs, her would-be saviors are brutally murdered, leaving Kate toflee into the deep tunnels. While what is happening to her seems the work of some kind of horrible cryptid, the perpetrator is actually an insane hermit called Craig who lives in the sewer tunnels and picks off unsuspecting people that stray too far into the depths or end up locked in the station after hours. Craig keeps his victims in half-submerged cages, torturing them and performing horrible surgery on them.Creeplives up to its name with plenty of scares and a truly horrible antagonist.
Nightbreed
Written and directed by Clive Barker and based on his novellaCabal, Nightbreedstars Craig Sheffer as Boone, a man dealing with mental health issues and plagued by dreams of a place full of monsters called Midian. Unfortunately for Boone, his psychiatristDr. Decker (David Cronenberg)is a serial killer and tries to convince Boone that he is actually doing the killing. Boone’s unstable state leads him to get hit by a car as he flees only to wake up in the hospital next to a man called Narcisse who screams about Midian.
Eventually, Boone finds Midian, a sprawling underground city beneath a graveyard, and true to his visions it is filled with monsters known as Nightbreed. In the depths of the city is their deity Baphomet, a god made of stone, whose body is damaged. The mix of monsters within the city is grotesque, beautiful, and frightening, but the true horror of the film is psychopath Decker, who has been using Boone to find Midian all along and who dons anincredibly creepy button-eyed mask.
Buried
The 2010 filmBuriedis billed as a thriller, but it is at its core a horror movie. Ryan Reynolds stars as Paul Conroy, an American civilian truck driver in Iraq who is attacked and abducted by terrorists and wakes up in a coffin, buried alive. In the coffin with him is a lighter, a pen, a Blackberry phone, a flashlight, a knife, glow sticks, and a flask. Paul receives a call from one of his captors explaining that without a five-million-dollar ransom, Paul and his colleagues will die.
From this point,Reynolds is completely aloneand is almost the only person that appears on-screen throughout the film. There is nowhere to hide and his performance conveys the abject terror and desperation of his situation with a chilling realism.Buriedis bleak, with a palpable tension that never lets up. Paul is betrayed by his employers to save their own skin and lied to by the government working to save him. There is no hope inBuried,only claustrophobic terror.
Barbarian
A surprise horror hit of 2022,Barbarianbecame a phenomenonno one expected. Written and directed by Zach Cregger, who is part of the comedy troupe theWhitest Kids You Know,Barbarianstars Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgard, and Justin Long. Tess (Campbell) arrives at her rental house only to find it double booked, and a man called Keith (Skarsgard) is already inside. The two eventually decide to share the property and even begin to form a friendship. Then Tess finds a strange door in the basement that leads to an expansive underground area.
Keith offers to investigate, promptly disappearing into the depths, and when he doesn’t return Tess follows. Something is living under the house, and it isn’t friendly. The audience is soonintroduced to AJ (Justin Long)an obnoxious sitcom actor who is experiencing the destruction of his career and is the owner of the property. Once he arrives at the site, the weirdness ofBarbariantruly ramps up. Motherly devotion, abject terror, and pure bizarreness are on display in a movie that doesn’t skimp on scares or lessons in morality.
