When I was a teenager, my family took a road trip through New Mexico and one of the stops was Carlsbad Caverns. If you’ve never been, imagine a place where the Earth seems to swallow you whole. The park ranger guided us down a winding path that seemed to spiral endlessly into the ground, deeper and deeper until the daylight was just a pinprick above us. The air grew cooler, the walls damp and every echo of our footsteps made me wonder what else might be moving in that darkness.
I wasn’t exactly claustrophobic, but the deeper we went, the more my teenage brain started conjuring images of what might be lurking just beyond the beam of my flashlight. Bats? Absolutely! But what if there was something worse? Something that wanted me to take one more step into the shadows before it pounced?
That feeling of discovery mixed with a crawling dread came rushing back while watching the horror film Scurry. Director Luke Sparke crafts a apocalyptic survival horror film that drops two strangers into a nightmare beneath the city streets. It is part cave-crawling thriller and part creature feature, and while it does not completely deliver on all its promises, it succeeds at capturing the suffocating sensation of being trapped underground with no easy way out.
The story of Scurry is straightforward enough. Mark (Jamie Costa) wakes up injured in a collapsed tunnel system. Before he can make sense of what is happening, he comes across Kate (Emalia), another survivor in this underground maze.
The pair quickly realize they’re not alone. Skittering, hulking insect-like creatures have made these tunnels their hunting grounds. Escape isn’t just about finding daylight. It’s about staying one step ahead of things with too many legs and teeth to be friendly.
The film’s biggest strength is its atmosphere. Everything feels damp, cold and constricting, much like what you would experience when trapped underground. You can almost smell the mildew in the air. The camera lingers on tight corridors, emphasizing just how little space there is to move. This is horror by confinement, and the film milks it for every ounce of tension. You are constantly aware of how the characters’ movements are affected by the environment.
Crawling, crouching and squeezing through cracks all become part of the struggle, giving audiences a full sense of claustrophobia. With the film presented as one continuous take, the tension builds without pause. When the creatures attack, they do not need to do much to be terrifying because the setting itself has already done the heavy lifting.
If this sounds familiar, it is because Scurry owes a debt to Neil Marshall’s The Descent. That 2005 underground nightmare is still the gold standard for claustrophobic creature horror, and Scurry does not quite reach those heights. Where The Descent was brutal, suffocating and emotionally raw, Scurry is more streamlined and pulpier. It is content to give you a tense ride and a few well-timed monster reveals rather than peel back layers of psychological terror. But even if it never quite matches the deep panic of The Descent, it still scratches the same itch: that awful thrill of realizing the Earth has you trapped and that you are not alone down there.
Jamie Costa anchors the film as Mark; the everyman suddenly thrust into extraordinary danger. He does not play it as a hardened hero but as someone who is just barely holding it together, which feels right for the story. Emalia’s Kate is equally grounded, offering a mix of fear, defiance and vulnerability, not trusting Mark, but having no choice except to work with him. Together, they create a dynamic that works best when the script allows them moments of quiet, pauses between the chaos where survival feels less about running from monsters and more about clinging to another human in the dark.
That said, Scurry isn’t without its flaws. For every moment of tight suspense, there’s another moment where the pacing drags. Some scenes stretch on longer than they should, and a few of the dialogue exchanges feel a little too stiff, as if the script writers didn’t quite trust the actors to carry the emotional weight without spelling everything out. And while the film’s commitment to keeping the action underground is admirable, it also means there are limited ways for the story to grow. By the third act, the story begins to feel repetitive: crawl, hide, encounter monster, escape, repeat. The film could have benefitted from a few more surprises in the plot to keep viewers engaged.
Visually, the film makes strong use of shadows and minimal lighting, which adds to the claustrophobia. There are shots where the darkness is nearly absolute, leaving you straining to see what the characters can’t. This works beautifully most of the time, though occasionally the dimness makes it hard to follow the action clearly.
Still, in horror, sometimes less is more, and here the darkness feels like a character in itself.
I give Scurry three out of five stars. In the end, Scurry succeeds at being an unnerving little survival horror film. It doesn’t reach the heights of The Descent, but it doesn’t have to. It does what it sets out to do: trap you in the dark with creatures you wouldn’t want to meet in your worst nightmare.
For me, it brought back those memories of Carlsbad Caverns, the thrill and fear of being swallowed by the Earth, of realizing how small and vulnerable you really are. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a solid thriller worth checking out if you’re in the mood for claustrophobic creature horror. Just don’t watch it right before planning a cave tour.