“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” of 1974 (remade four times so far,
incidentally) probably initiated the idea of the faux documentary as a basis
for the horror film. Possibly more influential, if more crudely made, the
brilliantly marketed “Blair Witch Project” solidified the concept, inspiring a
number of later movies — the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, for example, now
frightens a whole new generation of fans. If the premise of some extraordinary
and scary events, often shown through deliberately amateurish technique and
faked found footage, seems at least superficially like real life, then those
events obviously heighten the level of suspense and terror.
The new movie, “As Above, So Below,” looks something like a
compendium of previous works in the genre. It borrows much of its manner and
matter from an odd combination of pictures — obviously “The Blair Witch
Project,” and its imitators, but also a couple of non-horror flicks, “The Da
Vinci Code” and “National Treasure.”
Though again pretending to be a sort of documentary, it often looks as
slick as any Hollywood product.
The movie begins with a confused series of events in some
Iranian tunnels, where a young female archaeologist explores a forbidden site,
an expedition that ends in explosions and destruction. It reopens with the
woman, Scarlett (Perdita Weeks), addressing the
camera of a documentary filmmaker, Benji (Edwin Hodge),
smugly admitting that she has more degrees than a thermometer and knows four
spoken languages and two dead ones. She
asks an old friend, George (Ben Feldman), to translate an inscription in
Aramaic, one of the dead ones she doesn’t know, which enables her to embark on
the same mission that obsessed her late father, the search for the
Philosopher’s Stone.
That mythical object, which belongs in the same category as
the Holy Grail, possesses transmutational powers,
notably able to change lead into gold. Like a real scholar, however, Scarlett
seeks not lucre but learning, the truth that will justify her father’s
supposedly lunatic quest. The Aramaic inscription, coupled with an ancient map,
identifies the location of the Stone somewhere in the catacombs beneath the
streets of Paris.
Scarlett enlists a crew of Parisian cave explorers familiar with the catacombs, and the gang, along with Benji,
all equipped with miniature video cameras, descends into the caverns,
proceeding, sometimes on a pavement of human bones, through an endless series
of narrow apertures, tunnels, wells, even underwater passages. Along the way
they encounter numerous strange phenomena — evidence of human habitation, a
spooky choir, a ringing telephone, a crusted piano that still plays, the
preserved corpse of a medieval knight, and a whole new batch of cryptic
inscriptions and symbols guiding them toward the Stone.
As in “The Da Vinci Code” and “National Treasure,” the crew
pauses for readings of all the signs, with learned interpretations by Scarlett
and George. Some of the signs lead them astray, so at times they travel in
circles, diving into the same waters, clambering up the same rocky slopes,
rappelling down the same wells, digging through the same walls, repeating the
same moments of shock.
As any pale and trembling veteran of the genre knows full
well, nothing good will happen when a group of young people go somewhere they
shouldn’t, which in “As Above, So Below” means that some of Scarlett’s crew
will suffer more than others, that worse things than shock await them in the
depths of the catacombs. Other dangers demand seemingly superhuman efforts by
some of the others, including some foolhardy and, despite the documentary
context, quite unbelievable stunts.
Despite the countless frights that Scarlett and her gang
confront in this dark journey through the bowels of the City of Light, this
literal descent into a Hell right out of Dante, the greatest horror of them all
grows out of the path they take. The overpowering constriction of the labyrinth
they must negotiate to achieve Scarlett’s quest constitutes an acutely and
terrifyingly claustrophobic nightmare. Perhaps the scariest moment of all in
fact occurs when the chubby Benji, crawling over a
river of bones, finds himself stuck, unable to go forward or back, and panics. The
picture needs no fake documentary to create that horror — that’s real enough
for anyone.
This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2014.
