As Above / So Below Brings Fictional Horrors to the Real Paris Catacombs

We talked to writer/director duo John and Drew Dowdle about their new horror flick, filmed on location in the catacombs below Paris.

At first glance, Legendary’s upcoming horror flick As Above / So Below — out this weekend — seems to be a pretty standard horror archetype. After all, a group of people trapped together in a confined space who are confronted by their deepest fears could describe the better part of the entire genre. It’s the execution of this base idea that makes As Above stand out, shot in a found footage style in the actual Paris Catacombs over six weeks. Being shot on location — it was the first film to shoot in a number of off-limits sections of the catacombs — using a Red Epic camera and helmet cameras on all of the actors means that the footage has an immediacy that really ups the horror factor.

To find out just where this film came from, we sat down with the creative team behind it: brothers John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle. The duo wrote the script together and John serves as director while Drew serves as producer — and both were on-hand to work through the challenges of this unique location shoot.

The film’s premise is straightforward: archeologist Scarlett Marlowe (Perdita Weeks) is hunting for the mythical Philosopher’s Stone, a chase which leads her to the Paris Catacombs. The main character was always meant to be a woman — the Dowdles cite influences like Ellen Ripley from Alien and Sarah Connor from Terminator — and she’s not there just to scream at opportune moments like some horror story heroines. “I always liked those movies and it just felt right for this,” explains John. “There’s nothing more fun than seeing a badass female lead.”

The idea for the character of Scarlett came well before the rest of the movie — but when Legendary’s Thomas Tull called talking about a film set in the Paris Catacombs, the Dowdles knew Scarlett would be a perfect fit. “Drew and I had this idea that we wanted to do a kind of female Indiana Jones action character,” says John. “We wanted to do it in a found footage way — to do an epic movie but in a really personal, intimate scale.” The character, the setting, and the style just clicked together.

The catacombs presented a unique challenge… but also a unique opportunity. Located nearly 5 stories underground, most of the catacombs’ 180 miles of tunnels are off-limits to tourists, and they made for cramped, awkward spaces to film in. “We really had to go with a minimal crew and were just on top of each other,” explains Drew. “Running through those tunnels, you’d have the entire cast, the camera, a focus puller, a boom operator, and us all trailing the camera and trying to stay out of the frame, all in pitch darkness and banging our heads.”

Finding the right locations to shoot in this massive space was nearly as time-consuming as the shoot itself — the Dowdles spent six weeks prepping and location-scouting before the filming started, mostly underground. “We’d written the script but as we explored more we’d be like ‘this would be cool, we could do a thing here with this’ and we’d write that in,” says John. The majority of the film is found locations — like a tunnel the group descends through, which was originally use to lower ink to Capuchin monks in the 1500s — but occasionally they had to augment the spaces they found. As the film’s characters confront their personal demons within the catacombs, the set dressing became more complicated — for one scene, a car was brought in (and set on fire), for another, a piano was needed.

Of the scenes filmed, the car scene is a favorite of both John and Drew. “It’s a really strange moment,” explains John. Despite the presence of a burning car that the crew has had to carry five stories underground, the scene is understated: you see the car and one of the characters says ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ “We decided early on that we weren’t going to belabor the explanation of the backstory for each character,” says Drew. “For Scarlett and George we learn a lot more about what’s haunting them but for some of these other characters we might just have one line, like ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ Clearly something happened here that probably was his fault, but I like not telling the whole story but giving just a piece of it.”

The cramped quarters, on-location shoot didn’t allow for traditional filmmaking techniques, but going with the found footage style offered a degree of creative freedom as well. “There’s a bit of form and function,” says John. “We wanted to go guerrilla, into the real catacombs and shoot the real thing.” With no marks for the actors or complicated camera and lighting setups, it was easy to make changes on the fly. “It allows you to play more jazz than shooting the storyboards. It creates an energy that I feel is really fun to play with.”

Plus, the self-documenting style that the helmet cameras offered just worked with the story. “These people would document what they were going to see,” says Drew. “The justification of the camera was never an issue. The addition of the head cameras allowed us to have a little bit more coverage and have a little more flexibility in the editorial to jump around. It’s just so much more immediate.”