How frightening does evil have to be for the Church to bury it for centuries under the mountains? What are the ramifications of breaking the seal and entering? That is exactly what we learn in ‘The Cave,’ and it is terrifying. This one would undoubtedly pique your interest if you enjoy adventure or exploration films. However, do not be deceived by the subterranean exploring; this is a horror film at its core. The picture has a fantastic sense of realism, which is likely due to the fact that it was shot in Romania, which contains over 12,000 caverns.
The Cave is a 2005 American action horror film directed by Bruce Hunt and distributed by Screen Gems. It was Hunt’s first and last feature film as a filmmaker. The script was co-written by Michael Steinberg and Tegan West.
It follows a group of cave divers and scientists who become lost while studying a Romanian tunnel system and come face to face with a mutant beast. The cast includes Cole Hauser, Eddie Cibrian, Morris Chestnut, Marcel Iureş, Lena Headey, Rick Ravanello, Piper Perabo, and Daniel Dae Kim. Lena Headey is best known for her portrayal as Cersei Lannister in the HBO series Game of Thrones. Are you prepared to discover what lies within the cave?
Taking Terror to a whole new Depth – The Cave (2005)
This movie came out the same year as another underground horror movie called ‘The Descent’. And while ‘The Descent’ wiped the floor with this one, both in terms of box office success and critics reviews, it still remains an enjoyable film to watch, if you’re into monsters and adventure. The movie begins by showing us an old Romanian Abbey, where the Church sealed up a cave in the Carpathian Mountains. We watch as a massive landslide destroys most of it, along with the people that live there.
Next, we glimpse a team of Soviet and British plunderers reaching the Abbey. They make their way through the ruins and find the mouth of the cave which was sealed with inscriptions of monsters. They try blowing up the seal and while they are successful, they also bring the remainder of the structure crashing down and get stuck inside the cave, never to be seen again.
Fast forward to the current time, a new team attempts to explore the cave to find new biological life inside the self-contained eco-system. Interestingly, because new micro-ecologies have been discovered in deep caves, particularly in Romania, the film claims to be based on fact. In the late 1980s, 35 totally new species were discovered in the Movila Caves according to film consultant Dr. Christi Lascu, who is a renowned speleologist and the Romanian editor of the National Geographic magazine.
A 10cm centipede with a lethal bite was discovered among the species. Though nothing was found in the caves that corresponded to the creature’s size in the movie. However, according to scientists, there is no theoretical limit to the size of animals that live down there.
The new team is led by Dr. Nicolai, his associate Dr. Kathryn Jennings and cameraman Alex Kim, who investigate the site and the folklore surrounding the winged demons represented in the abbey’s floor mosaic. Local biologists believe the cave may hold an undiscovered environment, so they employ a group of American spelunkers, led by brothers Jack and Tyler McAllister, who operate a world-famous team of divers.
They rock up in Romania with a rebreather that has been modified to allow a diver to stay submerged for up to 24 hours. Charlie, a rock climber, Briggs, a first scout, Strode, a sonar expert, and Top Buchanan, a survival expert, make up the dive crew. This is the group that will quickly go from exploring to barely surviving in the cave system.
They start their exploration and lower themselves down to a place that Dr. Nicolai named ‘Titan Hall’, a massive underground cave with water running through it. Briggs is sent ahead to scout the cave system. He dives underwater and reaches a dry cavern from where he contacts the others. However, the connection cuts off abruptly, causing the others to all go and look for him.
The underwater dive scenes are beautiful to look at, and you would never think that to shoot all of these underwater photographs and scenes, a 750,000-gallon tank was built and all of it was shot indoors. They reach Briggs and find him alive and this is where things start to go wrong.
Strode and Tyler go underwater, and Strode is attacked and pulled away by a creature while Tyler is unable to help him. Not only do they lose Strode, but also his water scooter explodes in the chaos and causes the rock system to fall into the river, blocking the route they entered from, trapping them.
At this point, Jack and Top decide that they have to search for a new way out, and they go off further inside the cave system while Dr. Nicolai and Kathryn take a look at the moles and amphibians inside the cave. They discover a new parasite in the bodies of their specimens which Kathryn believes is an organism that has never been exposed to live outside the cave. In the meanwhile, as Jack and Top explore, Jack gets stuck in a crevice and is dragged by the monster.
Top manages to rescue him and pull him out but Jack is left with a nasty wound on his back. The top also manages to cut off one of the creature’s claws which Kathryn investigates and finds to be the same parasite. They dress the wound and decide to keep moving. The cave sequences make the atmosphere of the movie chilling and the use of light really sets up the suspense.
They find human bones and we see Jake’s body going through changes, where his hearing and sense of smell gets better and his eyeballs turn into slits. That’s when the viewer realizes that Jack has been infected by the parasite. However, the others keep following him and none of them realize that they are being stalked by the creatures that live in the cave system.
Jack leads them to a series of rapids that he believes will take them to the exit and in the process of trying to make it through the rapids, they lose Dr. Nicolai who falls behind and is torn apart by the creatures.
These scenes were grueling to film because the actors had to wear a wetsuit for up to 12 hours a day, continuously in and out of the water. One of the film’s producers, Andrew Mason, also claimed that in order to keep the movie as technically credible as possible, they enlisted some of the world’s best cave divers as advisors.
Next, they have to scale a massive rock wall and Charlie, being their best climber goes ahead but when she reaches the top, she comes face to face with the horrible, white, slimy, massive, winged creature with razor-sharp teeth. She tries to escape but to no avail and the rest of them can only watch as she is killed by the creature.
At this point, with so many of their people dead, Kathryn, Kim, and Briggs lose their trust in Jack. Kathryn even says that Jack has been infected by the parasite and that it was probable that the parasite itself mutated other living beings so that they could survive in the caves.
Kathryn, Briggs, and Kim part with Tyler Tops, and Jack and go their separate ways to find an exit. Tyler, Tops, and Jack manage to find the exit but Tyler goes back for the other 3. Briggs, Jack, and Kim die fighting the creatures and only 3; Tops, Kathryn, and Tyler make it out alive.
The movie ends with a reunion between Kathryn and Tyler and as she kisses him goodbye, he sees that her eyes have turned into slits, meaning that she was infected with the parasite. Before he can stop her, she disappears into the crowd, spreading the parasite.
Mutated Human Cave Monster
The cave monster is the central antagonist in the movie so let’s take a look at what exactly it is. The Cave Monsters are native to a vast cave system in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains. They descended from humans who have been infected and altered by the cave parasite, which gives the host a form more suited to surviving in the subterranean environment, thus benefiting both the host and the parasite, proving that the latter should be considered more of a symbiont.
Increased aggression and extremely sensitive hearing are the first signs of illness. This is explained when Dr. Kathryn realizes that all the men that have entered the cave system suffered the same fate because no one got out and they mutated into the cave monsters.
The creatures are thus classified under mutated monsters instead of aliens because the parasite that inhabits their bodies is something that dwells in the cave itself. According to Dr. Kathryn in the movie, the parasite has never seen the light of day and thus completely belongs to the cave ecosystem itself.
The cave monsters have been part of the local legend since the middle-ages, as the people considered the mutated humans to be demons which made the church seal off the cave. This is also why the seals and inscriptions all bore the images of winged demons, that turned out to be humans mutated by the cave parasite living in isolation for centuries in the self-contained ecosystem.
The Cave Monsters which are fully mutated are enormous, skeletal monsters with rough hairless skin and no eyes or pigments. They feature bat-like wings and massive talons for eviscerating food, as well as multiple spikes on their backs, a cranial crest, and a lipless mouth packed with vicious teeth. The parasite can be seen as hyphae-like structures throughout their muscle tissues. They are shown multiple times past the halfway mark of the movie and even shown in their full glory when one of the attacks and kills Charlie. We also see their menacing teeth each time they attack one of the protagonists.
The Cave Monsters can use echolocation to “see” their surroundings. This echolocation and a heightened sense of hearing are among the changes that we see happening to Jack after he gets infected. They also have the ability to fly and swim, as well as the intelligence to set traps and steal crucial resources from potential victims.
They cunningly stalk the group as they try to find the exit, and do so completely unnoticed by any of them. They can also move with incredible dexterity through the stalactites that cling to the cave ceilings and relentlessly hunt prey. They are also massive in size; nearly 7 feet tall with a large wingspan. We know for a fact that the monsters are deadly because out of a party of 9 people, only 3 survive, and even amongst the survivors, one of them is infected by the parasite.
However, they are not all-powerful and are in fact sensitive to strong light. Also, focused sonic waves can make them disoriented and repel them. This is a discovery made by Dr. Kathryn, Tyler, and Jack when they realize that they can hold them off with the sonic machine, even if it’s not for very long.
Since it is established that these cave monsters are mutated humans, we are likely to think that the human mind and heart are somewhere in there, right? Nonetheless, it’s uncertain how much of their original thoughts remain, or even whether they can recognize humans as members of the same species. While they appear to assault humans with the objective of transferring the parasite, they also kill victims for the purpose of feeding on them.
Still-living victims have been spotted impaled on stalactites, possibly to preserve them for later consumption. Their natural prey inside the caves on the other hand appears to be huge, hairless cave rats in the absence of humans.
What happens to these creatures in the end? Well, even though Dr. Kathryn, Tops, and Tyler survive, we can assume that the creatures themselves, since they are light-sensitive will not come out of the cave system and will continue to live there.
But, the ending of the film offers us a twist. Kathryn Jennings was infected by the parasite and we only get to know that when we see her eyes moments before she disappears, and Tyler is unable to locate her. She appeared to be aware of the fact that she was infected before the transformation began. When she left the cave, she meant to transfer the infection to others, allowing the animals to invade the surface world this way. This shows that the parasite does indeed take control of the host’s mind, at least to some extent.
The cave monsters definitely made for some super scary scenes in the movie. They are strong and intelligent creatures and if we draw a comparison with the humanoid creatures that we saw in ‘The Descent’, these ones are definitely much scarier and the thought and design that went into the making of these monsters are definitely appreciable.
Why should you watch ‘The Cave’?
The plot is one that feels known, and the characters are all stereotypes. Yet, Hunt manages to pull off a solid horror film. The ensemble is surprisingly star-studded, with your normal team of stupid scientists making some questionable decisions and then becoming action heroes when things go wrong. There’s Morris Chestnut, who played a similar role in ‘Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid’, Daniel Dae Kim, who played Jin in the TV show ‘LOST’, and Lena Headey, who went on to portray Cersei in ‘Game of Thrones.
If you are a horror fan and enjoy creature features, this one will definitely capture your fancy. As we have already explored above, these creatures are well made and well thought out, making it super fun to watch as they use all of their skills and powers and the protagonists have to fight against them. Underwater caves are always a frightful setting, and with this looming danger of creatures who are big and cunning enough to be able to hunt humans with ease, you have the makings of a stellar film.
The innovative lighting along with the shots of the cave system gives the film a creepy and unnerving aura which is definitely effective and keeps you on the edge of your seat because you keep expecting something to pop out from somewhere.
While the film is not as good as it could have been, it definitely is a fun watch. The film is also PG-13 so there aren’t many issues with age restrictions. The movie runs for over one and a half hours and might feel stretched out here and there, but the action and people getting attacked left and right is what will keep you hooked. The film is available on OTT platforms so what are you waiting for?