Setting his film "The Descent" in a cave, Neil Marshall enjoyed a distinct advantage from the start.

"It's perfect for a horror movie," Marshall said while visiting Comic-Con in San Diego recently. "You can manipulate fear in so many ways. You have heights, you have drowning. It's one of the ultimate environments for terror. Combine that with an all-female cast and you have something different."

"The Descent" is not only different, it has already enjoyed a successful run in theaters in Europe, winning film festival prizes, earning big grosses and becoming the rare genre film to practically dominate the nominations at the British Film and Television Awards.

The film features six smart, tough women characters, adventure daredevils who decide to explore a deep cave in the Appalachians, partly because they enjoy challenges, partly to help one of the characters recover from a personal tragedy.

After finding themselves trapped deep in the cave with no apparent way out, infighting begins, followed by fear and claustrophobia. If that weren't enough, the women are soon introduced to the crawlers -- gory, slimy humanoids that devour flesh, apparently a mutant human that has existed and thrived in these caves for millions of years. Needless to say, these creatures double the trouble.

"I didn't want a bunch of scream queens," said Marshall, who wrote and directed the film. "I'm not sure any horror film has featured so many brave, tough, intelligent women characters. I also liked the idea of using relatively unknown actors, but women who could really act."

The cast and crew went through two weeks of cave training before starting filming at Britain's Pinewood Studios, where the cave sequences were shot. The shoot was a challenge, not only because of the dark, wet shooting conditions, difficult even on an indoor set, but also because the crawlers required extensive makeup each day to achieve their ugly-gory appearance.

"We settled on them being more human, less monster," Marshall said. "That seemed more frightening. They are basically cavemen who stayed in the cave, and evolved into something hideous."

The film was shot with two different endings, one ending shown in the European version and a different ending for the U.S. release, the kind of trivia tidbits horror fans love. Marshall, whose 2002 horror film "Dog Soldiers" established him as a creative new leader for the genre, says many have influenced him.

"I like 'Blade Runner' and 'Alien,' but also Spielberg and 'Raiders of the Lost Ark,'" Marshall said. "For this film, I was also heavily influenced by 'Deliverance.' I also like the idea of keeping the horror real, rather than manipulated by technology. Computer-generated films have their place, but there's nothing quite like real."