I was thinking of what worthy horror films I might watch over the Halloween season and I re-read Steve Tompkins’ blog post of 8/17/2006, “Walking Up and Down in the Earth.”

It’s here…

http://leogrin.com/CimmerianBlog/walking-up-and-down-in-the-earth/

In this piece, as eloquent, insightful and amusing as ever, Steve addressed the paucity of good sword & sorcery movies and pointed out how S&S fans kind of make do by enjoying films that display some of the elements found in the sacred genre. Or by savoring individual scenes that appear in films that aren’t really close to S&S. Scenes that a pack a specific kind of visceral charge that we hungry fans might roughly equate with Sword & Sorcery.

I immediately understood exactly what he was getting at. Yeah, There’s that scene in Navajo Joe where Burt Reynolds, on foot and pursued by four desperadoes intent on taking his life, leads his enemies into a natural amphitheater in a blazing desert, and when they follow him in he’s disappeared---just before he begins picking them off one by one.

Or that one in Ironclad where the opponents of King John are holed up in a castle keep and the enemy’s broken into the courtyard when behind them, from the stables, bursts James Purefoy in full armor on horseback laying about himself with a morning star and one of the defenders sees him coming to their aid and howls his name, “Marshal!” Gave me a chill. So yeah. Sword and sorcery fans do that. Maybe we have to.

The crux of Steve’s post is an appreciation of Neil Marshall’s 2005 film, The Descent. Making neat connections with Karl Edward Wagner’s “.220 Swift” and REH’s “Worms of the Earth” along the way, Steve shows how the climax of this grim horror film offers a clash between desperate warriors and the grisly forces of the underworld that satisfies on a primal basis that is as elemental and powerful as good Sword and Sorcery.

A cruelly claustrophobic tale about a group of female cavers who get lost and endure all manner of discomforts before encountering a truly grotesque collection of subterranean dwellers in absolute darkness, The Descent is a fine horror film and well worth watching (or re-watching) for Halloween.

I also saw it back in the day and noted the fierce and uncompromising face-off near the end. Two warriors hold the narrow passage and, with pick, torch and bare, bloody hands, hold off the ravening creatures of darkness. It’s fine stuff. I wish I could have talked to Steve about it.