Death Line (also known as Deathline; U.S. title Raw Meat) is a 1972 British-American horror film written and directed by Gary Sherman and starring Donald Pleasence, Norman Rossington, David Ladd, Sharon Gurney, Hugh Armstrong, and Christopher Lee.

Calhoun's colleague tells him about the history of the London Underground, particularly the Victorian railway workers who constructed the tunnels under dire conditions, and an urban legend that a group of descendants who survived an 1892 cave-in still live below ground.

As they search through the abandoned section, they uncover a room full of corpses laid in bunk beds – the generations of survivors from the cave-in that occurred a century before – including the cannibal, bleeding profusely, apparently dead.

Director Gary Sherman kept them in separate shots until Lee sits down at the end of the scene, so that he would not have issues fitting them both into the same frame.

[5] Aldwych (formerly Strand) station was used for underground sequences, as it was only open for weekday Peak services since 1962, and was subsequently closed completely in 1994.

Death Line premiered in London on 17 November 1972 as a double bill with The Triple Echo[1] and was later released in the United States under the title Raw Meat on 3 October 1973.

On 5 April 2011, the film was re-released on DVD in a six-film set alongside other MGM horror titles, Pumpkinhead (1988), Dolls (1987), Scarecrows (1988), Sometimes They Come Back (1991), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).

Certainly the film is a powerful and terribly distressing embodiment of the Descent myth, built on the relationship between our complacent surface world of technology, social progress, moral emancipation, and an underworld that represents the very worst conditions in which life and 'humanity', however degraded, can survive.

More impressively, there is Donald Pleasence's inspector, set against both 'couples', his absolute separateness (he has no close human ties, no deep attachments) the condition for his independence and splendid resilience.

But the Man is the film's real hero, unutterably horrible and repellent, yet irrefutably human; ourselves, as we might survive in the most terrible conditions imaginable.

[13] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called the film "a good debut, but it's undermined by several vast improbabilities in the script and by the painfully inept performance of one of its leads, David Ladd".

[It] is strong without being schematic; one can't talk of allegory in the strict sense, but the action consistently carries resonances beyond its literal meaning".