Crawlers (The Descent)
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The Crawlers are a Morlock-like human subspecies in The Descent that have resorted to cannibalism. According to an interview with Neil Marshall at Movies Online!, "The crawlers are cave men that never left the cave," ... "They’ve evolved over thousands of years, living down there in families. They’ve lost their eyesight; they have acute hearing and smell; and they function perfectly in the pitch black. They're expert climbers, so they can go up any rock face and that is their world. These girls infringe upon their world, and the crawlers are simply defending their territory." [1]
[edit] Scientific Errors
It has been claimed that no cave men lived in that region of America before the very late arrival of the Native Americans 16,000 years ago. As they were far more advanced than cave men, why a tribe would live in caves and evolve into the crawlers is a mystery. Also how the Crawlers sustain themselves is open to question as, even if they do hunt on the surface, it would be easier for them to hunt during the day as they would require large game to sustain them. [2]
[edit] Trivia
- Out of all the Crawlers seen, only one female was ever seen.
- Craig Conway, who plays the crawler who features in the majority of The Descent’s fight sequences, says “A crawler is a sub-human, almost Neanderthal, creature that ended up missing out on the evolutionary development of mankind, and has been left in the cave systems to dwell forever more." [1]
- A similar though different form of creature appeared in the movie The Cave, however, these were mutated humans that were altered by a subterranean parasites. See Demon (The Cave).
- The director's assertion that the Crawlers have a highly acute sense of smell is largely contradicted by the actual content of the film, as on several occasions their victims are able to hide from them very effectively at extremely close range by simply keeping still and silent. In these scenes Crawlers pass literally within inches of the terrified women (in one instance even leaning its hand on one of them) and yet are unable to detect them by scent.
- Another similar creature is the Cave Dweller, Homo spelocanthropus, From Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future by Dougal Dixon. A subterranean species that lives in caves and tunnels and only comes to the surface at night to hunt. Eyesight is atrophied but presumably their hearing is acute.
- According to the commentary track by director Neil Marshall, their appearance was inspired by that of Count Orlok from Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens.
- The novel The Descent features a similar race of alternately-evolved, subterranean humanoids termed Homo hadalis or "Hadals". Like the Crawlers, they defend their underground territory from human intrusion.
