As Above, So Below (2014)

directed by John Erick Dowdle
USA, France
93 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

A lot of people doing October horror challenges right now seem to have a "no rewatches" rule, but not me. This month has been all about revisiting movies I may have had the wrong opinion of, or that I fell asleep during, and it's leading me to see some very good films in a new light. I know As Above, So Below isn't well-liked, but hear me out: it's fun.

It has all the problems every other adventure movie involving archeology has, I.E.: professors who are implausibly young and gorgeous, people casually mishandling artifacts, people instantly translating dead languages into modern English so accurately that they rhyme, lots of Orientalism, et cetera. You can't really think of As Above, So Below as a movie that's trying to be realistic about academia, archeology, history, or basically much of anything; you have to have the mindset that it's an adventure film, first and foremost. And I think we're lucky that it actually has an interesting concept and plot to fuel its madcap underground Parisian adventures.

I'm aware that nobody likes shaky-cam, but the thing this movie does that I like so much is use the shaky-cam to disguise just enough of certain things that your brain doesn't have enough of an image to latch onto. A lot of the creepier scenes in this film go by so quickly and are so out-of-focus that we only catch an uncanny glimpse that suggests much more. What was wrong with that monk's face? Were those human mouths sticking out of the ground? Are those faces in the wall moving? At times this movie goes too full-frontal, such as with the corny stone demon things, but the things that are kept to the periphery are almost more scary than the things we see head-on.

I am also a fan of the sound design in this because they don't use the typical scare chords and yet there's some noises that are seriously disturbing at times. There's an inscription about the trumpet call that raises the dead acting as a Chekhov's gun at the start of the film, but I think when we see the word "trumpet" we're put in mind of something much different than the sounds that come later. I loved how immersed I got in this, putting myself in the characters' shoes, imagining being impossibly deep underground with this bassy, deafening drone suddenly coming from all sides so loud it rattles your bones. It feels so dramatic, I loved it.

A couple of years ago I probably would have just sided with everybody else in saying this film is overrated and cheesy and not a good horror movie, but now I'm better at disregarding the popular opinion and making my own decision as to if I like a movie or not. I think it's nicer to not hold grudges against movies if you have no personal reason to.