Last Updated on December 5, 2025 by Angel Melanson
NOTE: The following assumes you have seen The Descent, and in turn contains massive spoilers.
Let's just get what's probably your first question answered right away: yes, the official novelization of The Descent uses the original UK ending, not the “happy” US one. The existence of the (underrated!) sequel tells us that Sarah gets out, and honestly since this is a new adaptation written twenty years later I half assumed they'd throw in a few nods to the sequel's storyline (maybe a mention that Juno's uncle was a senator?), but nope: it ends just as the UK one does, with (spoiler) Sarah still trapped in the cave, presumably forever.
(Side note: I have argued for nearly 20 years that the US one is actually darker. There she gets out and is haunted by terrifying ghosts of her friends, whereas in the “downer” ending she is trapped, yes, but in her mind she's at peace with her daughter. I know which one I'd pick.)
But fear not, UK viewers who saw that as the ending all along – there's still plenty of added material here to enjoy. In addition to reinserting most of the deleted scenes that are available on the Blu-ray, author Christian Francis has added a prologue with some monster action and lots of character beats and background information that give more dimension to our six heroes. It’s the same approach he took with Session 9 last year, but I feel he did a better job this time around, with his changes feeling more naturally mixed in with the existing material.
That said, I could have done without the prologue, which is set in 1939 and focuses on two miners who head into the caves to find a missing crew, meeting their expected grisly fates. It's a total “We need more monster action at the beginning so it doesn't take 45 minutes for them to show up!” kind of move, but I've long felt that the great thing about The Descent is that it completely works as a straightforward survival thriller; when the monsters show up it's more of like a “NOW what?” kind of obstacle for what's already a stressful ordeal. By having this prologue, it tells you you're in a monster movie right from the start.
Luckily his other changes are for the better, as they all focus on the characters and how they connect/differ from each other. The most overt change is that the dynamic between Juno and Beth is very different here. In the movie they're pretty tight, with Beth just kind of rolling her eyes at Juno's gung ho/selfish attitude from time to time, but here it's pretty clear that Beth has very little love for the other woman. This is evident right off the bat, with the rafting trip before Sarah's family gets killed in the car crash. When Juno gives a longing look at Sarah's husband in the movie, Beth just kind of looks a bit concerned but then doesn't do anything else about it. Here, after Sarah takes off with her family, Beth actually confronts Juno about it, and Juno denies that anything is going on.
Beth isn’t convinced though, and they continue to get on each others’ nerves a few more times. Another notable change occurs when Sarah is stuck in the tunnel. In the movie, Beth calms her down by telling Sarah a pretty terrible joke, but here Beth uses the occasion to tell her friend a story about a loser that Juno hooked up with in college, saying it loud enough so that the others can hear and leave her frenemy embarrassed. And then later, when Sarah finds Beth dying, instead of just muttering Paul's name, Beth straight up calls Juno the C-word (not “caver”) and plainly says “She was fucking Paul behind your back.”
One could argue that this is perhaps a bit too spelled out (Neil Marshall himself may agree; the dialogue was in his original script, but removed), but I don't think their affair would be clear here if written exactly as presented on-screen, where it was all suggested. Indeed, a friend I saw the movie with back in 2006 (US release) completely missed those subtle clues and thought Sarah was merely getting revenge on Juno for Beth's death when she leaves her to die later. So this added dialogue, while a bit clunky (isn't Beth almost dead from a throat impalement? She sure is chatty), makes it crystal clear that Juno was not exactly a great friend, and it was the cause of Paul's distraction that led to Sarah’s tragic loss in the first place.
There's also a new sequence where Juno instructs everyone to turn off all of their lights and flares so they can enjoy the absolute pitch dark for a few moments, which probably would have been a fun thing to see (“see”?) on-screen. But even if it was ever in the script, I can see why it would be removed, as audiences would be starting to get restless that their horror movie hadn't had much horror yet. It's around here we get a proper explanation for Sam's annoying beeping watch (a gift from a boyfriend who worked different shifts so it would go off when he was about to get home), something I wish the movie had since it appears out of nowhere and seems somewhat contrived.
Curiously, Francis also removes the humor whenever possible. In addition to the loss of the lemon joke (which was pretty terrible, but it was supposed to be), the gags about Beth's pajamas, Holly's pratfall when impersonating Juno, and Sam's silly glasses are also MIA. He did this in Session 9, too (Mike's “party in the back” joke about Jeff’s mullet was removed! Sacrilege!), so maybe he feels it just doesn't make as much sense on the page? Still, considering the grim story, those moments of levity were much welcome in the movie, and it's a noticeable shift to have them all removed.
Most of the other changes are smaller, and often confined to the characters' heads. We get a little bit more about Rebecca's overprotectiveness of Sam, further explaining that their half-sister relationship is the result of an affair Rebecca's father had with another woman, which recontextualizes some of Sam's resentment toward her. We also learn Juno actually does feel guilty about the affair and subsequent accident, punishing herself with her morning runs, and also that she's always felt like a third wheel with Sarah and Beth, because she was the only American. And Francis also takes the time to explain the details of their climbing/caving gear. As with the affair stuff, on-screen it's easy enough to get the idea of what these things do without having to actually say so in dialogue, but reading on the page is a different matter. So Rebecca or Juno will explain it, usually for Sam's sake since she's a relative newcomer.
At 220 pages, it's a pretty quick read, but still has enough added material to entertain those who have seen the movie a dozen times (raises hand). The purist in me wishes that Titan would put these out in mass market size as opposed to trade paperbacks, but otherwise it feels very much like a tie-in book that would have come out in 2005 when the movie did, unlike some other newer novelizations for older films (i.e. the Stop the Killer ones) where they go way off track in order to give the hardcore fans a whole new way of looking at the movie they've loved for decades. Everything added here feels like something that might have been in the script at one point and merely lost along the way, just as the novelizations of yore always were.
Christian Francis' The Descent: The Official Movie Novelization is available for pre-order now for an October 7 release.
