His first film combined horror and gore with a fair bit of comedy, but his second feature is an altogether darker affair. In more ways than one. Nick Morrison talks to Newcastle film-maker Neil Marshall.

NEIL Marshall is making no apologies for the amount of blood in his latest film. In fact, you get the feeling that if he could have had more, he would have. As it is, to say the result is a bloodbath is something of an understatement. "The props guys were constantly nagging about the fact there was so much claret," he says. "We were drenching the set in blood every day. It was like an abattoir. I don't think I'll ever be able to top that."

But the gore isn't the only thing that gives The Descent its horror status. Psychological terror, wince-inducing moments and out-of-your-seat shocks are there in abundance as the Newcastle-born director ramped up the fear factor.

"I thought if I'm going to make a scary film, let's make it really scary," he says. "I wanted to get under people's skins and do something that was both psychological and physical. There are quite a few scenes in it where I had to really think what to do to make people jump, to unnerve people. The audience knows what is coming, it is just a question of where and when.

"And I specifically chose things that would make people wince: the rope burn across the palm of the hand, the bone sticking out. It is nasty stuff, but it is real stuff."

The Descent is Marshall's second feature after 2002s Dog Soldiers, a low-budget but critically acclaimed film which saw a six-man squad of soldiers on exercise in Scotland run across a family of werewolves. But whereas Dog Soldiers had its fair share of gore - including a scene where Sean Pertwee's sergeant has a tug of war with a dog over his own guts - it also played it for laughs. The Descent is an altogether darker film, and not just in mood.

On a daredevil caving holiday, six women become trapped underground. But as the group starts to unravel under the tension of their predicament, they come up against a colony of predators with a taste for blood. While they fight for their lives, old secrets are revealed and the group implodes. The underground setting for the film, with its twin horrors of the dark and claustrophobia, has its roots in a school trip more than 20 years ago.

"When I was about 12 we went to a lead mine in Northumberland. We went right down into the mine and they said everybody switch their lights off. For the first time in my life I experienced pitch darkness," Marshall says.

"They told us to stand still because 50 yards to our right there was a 200ft sharp drop. There was that real awareness of just how scary it was down there which stuck in my mind for years.

"I've never done any serious pot holing myself, and I'm not claustrophobic, but some of the photographs and video footage I've seen had an immediate effect on me. I thought it was a fantastic environment for a horror film, and to create that on film is a real challenge, and I know it really does disturb people."

Marshall wanted the lighting to be as realistic as possible, which means the underground scenes are lit only with what is available to the characters, whether it's head torches, flares or an infrared screen from a video camera. The lighting adds to the tension, but also meant they had to tackle the problems of shooting scenes in near-darkness.

"A lot of cave movies have these gratuitous shafts of light coming from all over the place. It looks beautiful but it makes no sense. I wanted the only light source to be what they carried with them, which made it very interesting. Early on it is ok, because they're all wearing helmets with lights on, but once they start to lose their equipment you have to figure out ways in which you see the scene," he says.

Although there are clear parallels with his first feature, he is adamant he didn't want to make Dog Soldiers 2. While that film featured six men, the six women in The Descent was the idea of his business partner. He originally planned a mixed group, but was convinced of the benefits of an all-female ensemble.

The Descent also depicts its monsters - Crawlers, cavemen who never left the caves and have evolved to live in the dark - as a social group, complete with mothers and children, reminiscent of the family of werewolves in Dog Soldiers. But as well as adding an element of empathy for the Crawlers, it was also a question of realism.

It is a colony and I thought that was far more believable than making them the classic monsters. If they had been all male, it would have made no sense, so I wanted to create a more realistic context for them," Marshall says. "I wanted to have this very feral, very primal species living underground, but I wanted to make them human. I didn't want to make them aliens because humans are the scariest things."

The success of Dog Soldiers helped get the film made, although even then Marshall had to turn to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? producers Celador, branching out into films, for finance. And he discovered it did put restrictions on his second project.

"The only way I was going to get another film made was to do another horror film. That was all anybody was interested in," he says. And although he enjoys the horror genre, and wants to return to it at some point, he wants his next move to be in a different direction. "There are other stories I want to do and they're not horror stories. I've got a few western ideas, I've got a couple of science fictions, adventure, a Second World War thriller. I've even got a musical. The only thing I haven't got is a romantic comedy," he says.

"I just want to tell stories, I'm not particularly bothered about what genre they are. If there is one linking theme to all the things I've come up with it is action, which is what I want to see in a film.

"I would do another horror film, but the amount of blood and guts we spilled in this film, where do we go from here?"

* The Descent is in cinemas from tomorrow.

Published: 07/07/2005