The film introduces a group of female friends, including Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), Beth (Alex Reid) and Juno (Natalie Mendoza), who convene periodically for an outdoor adventure of the extreme variety.

Nevertheless, in the years since its publication, there have been two films that have at least touched upon some of the novel's plot points, with varying degrees of success. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, the major Hollywood studios really don't have the stomach for big-budget, R-rated horror films any more. As we saw earlier this year, when the plugged was pulled on Guillermo del Toro's long-planned adaptation of H.P. The budget for such a project would be enormous, and some of the themes the book explores would likely be unpalatable for a mass audience, to say nothing of it's sometimes ghastly scenes of violence. I say 'might make,' because The Descen t tells a massively complex and epic story, and it would take a monumental effort to commit a reasonably faithful adaptation to film. I've read it (along with its sequel, Deeper) repeatedly over the past 13 years, and each time, I've contemplated what an amazing film it might make. The Descent quickly captivated me, and it has since become my favorite novel.

Long's extensive knowledge of climbing high mountains is easily inverted, providing a welcome sense of authenticity to his descriptions of a descent into the dark recesses of the planet.

The book is by turns thrilling, stomach-turning, frightening, awe-inspiring and moving it's truly vast in scope, and Long brilliantly juggles multiple storylines and a huge cast of characters, capping things off with a harrowing journey underneath the Pacific Ocean by a team of scientists and mercenaries. Conflicts erupt when the primitive cave dwellers venture into the surface world en masse, while corporate interests and individual settlers attempt to stake their claims in the resource-rich underworld. It is revealed that these beings, who branched off from the same roots as modern humans and were once superior to us, are the basis for the recurring legends of subterranean devils and demons throughout history, and their nightmarish, abyssal homeland naturally turns out to be a place better known abstractly as Hell. A rousing hybrid of horror, science fiction and adventure, the novel chronicles the discovery of a vast network of interconnected caverns beneath the surface of the Earth that is home to a species of devolved hominids with predilections toward cruelty and cannibalism. In 1999, mountain climber-turned-author Jeff Long published a remarkable novel entitled The Descent.

The descent by jeff long