Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of As Above, So Below
2014 · John Erick Dowdle · As Above, So Below on Sightlines
A headlamp swings across a wall and the wall is made of skulls. Real ones. Municipal workers stacked them there starting in the 1780s, when Paris ran out of graveyards and moved millions of its dead into the limestone quarries beneath its own streets, and John Erick Dowdle got permission to shoot among them. The lamp moves on, because the person wearing it has somewhere to be. The bone goes back into the black.
That gesture is the film: light finding something, then abandoning it. It's also a good place to learn what Gilles Deleuze meant by the out-of-field. Every frame cuts a piece out of something larger, and what sits outside comes in two kinds. The relative out-of-field is the next stretch of corridor — space you could pan to, walk into, map. The absolute out-of-field is a beyond that isn't anywhere. No pan reaches it, because it isn't adjacent. It's other.
Found footage has always run on the relative kind. The Blair Witch Project is woods just off-frame, over and over, and Dowdle inherits that grammar wholesale, down to the lamp-in-the-dark framing that stands in for editorial polish. What he does with it is a conversion. For a long while the dark past the beam is simply more tunnel. Then the group reaches a stone gate carved with Dante's warning, and the dark stops being Paris. You cannot pan to Hell.
The complaint most often filed against this film is that the shaky, wide-angle, half-obstructed image makes it impossible to tell where anybody is. That's the method, not the failure. Deleuze has a name for space that has lost its connective tissue: the any-space-whatever, and specifically the version built by disconnection, where a place is cut into fragments whose joins are no longer given. The Catacombs are a surveyed municipal site. Elliot Greenberg's editing exists to unmake that survey. He intercuts between helmet cams to fracture the space, lets lamps fail and take the frame with them, and assembles the descent as a one-way spiral with no route back. By the time you notice you can't navigate, neither can they.
Notice what carries this. There's no omniscient camera anywhere in the picture, only helmet cams and handhelds, so every frame is somebody's looking, which makes the perception-image the film's basic unit rather than its flavoring. When we ride Benji's camera and watch him watching, that doubling is what Deleuze calls a dicisign: perception perceived, the camera's presence felt inside a character's. Dowdle's invention isn't the rig, it's the distribution. He puts a camera on everyone, so no single witness holds the space together. Paranormal Activity's consumer-camera multicam is the ancestor; this industrializes it into a body-worn array, and a federated perception can never be totalized into a map.
Now the part that makes the film more than a scare-delivery machine. Deleuze's system pivots on movies where action stops working, where a character can only look. Horror does something else. The sensory-motor circuit never breaks here: Scarlett decodes a riddle, assembles a team, pursues an object, which is an action-image in its large form, the Indiana-Jones surface the screenplay openly wears. What corrodes is not the acting but the world the acting is supposed to land in. Deleuze called that region the impulse-image, the cinema of naturalism, and its two-floor architecture is exactly what "as above, so below" states as a maxim. The upper floor is the derived milieu, a concrete dated documented setting, and the Paris Catacombs are the most derived milieu you could ask for: ticketed, plaqued, the product of a specific municipal decision. The lower floor is the originary world, the same matter revealed as savage and made of appetite. A hundred feet down the film crosses from one to the other without changing location. Same stone. Different world.
What governs an impulse-image is the line of slope, an irreversible degradation toward exhaustion and death. Most films imply it. This one is built on it, and cutting the descent as a spiral with no way back turns a metaphor into geology. The drives are in plain sight too. Scarlett's quest is a compulsion rather than a plan, and it endangers everyone. The Philosopher's Stone is a fetish, a part-object torn out of the lower world and carrying its force. Each character's private sin surfaces as a symptom: George, the translator, meets his guilt made literal, and elsewhere a car burns underground and a figure walks in flame.
The strange furniture down there does something precise. A ringing telephone. A piano. Objects that could not be in a quarry. Deleuze distinguishes the mark, which means through its customary chain (see the gun, expect the shot), from the demark, an object wrenched out of its series so that habit can't read it and interpretation has to begin. The telephone is the clearest demark here, announcing a change of register with no dialogue and no explanatory cut. And these images aren't dated flashbacks, because nobody is remembering. They're closer to a dream-image, an inner circuit actualized as a world.
All of it is bought with Bazin's money. André Bazin argued that a photograph carries something of the being of the thing photographed, which is why a document persuades in a way a painting cannot. Found footage borrows that credit, usually by faking it — a conceit going back to Cannibal Holocaust and its recovered reel discovered after its makers vanish. Dowdle stopped borrowing and spent. Real ossuary, real bones, real hundred-feet-down, real oxygen debt on faces as bodies wedge through rock, which is the terror The Descent invented: torch as the only light, a person jammed in stone. That's a cinema of the body, duration carried by posture and breath instead of plot. The whole indexical fortune then buys belief in an unreal descent. Bazinian realism, financing an allegory.
That trade is the contribution. The mode's structural problem was always that the handheld image has enormous credibility and almost no metaphysical range: things go wrong, people die, the tape ends. Dowdle's answer wasn't to fix the image but to give it a cosmology. Dante supplies the vertical moral architecture; the hermetic maxim supplies a theory of why depth should mean anything. The descent becomes confession, the only way out is down and through, and found footage gets a redemptive shape it almost never earns. Be honest about the scale of this, though. The film spawned no school, the cycle was already ending, and its influence on later horror is modest. Its durable legacy is a place: it made the Paris Catacombs a marquee horror location for a mass audience, and proved how much a real site lends an otherwise conventional genre exercise. The Dowdles carried [REC]'s cameraman-as-witness rig, which they'd already remade once as Quarantine, straight down into it.
So watch the edge of the beam, not the middle. The middle is where the scares are; the edge is where the film thinks. And on a rewatch, try to say exactly where the tunnel stops being a tunnel. There's no cut that tells you, no line that marks it. Somewhere between the ossuary and the gate the space quietly changes category, and the film declines to say where. That isn't sloppiness. It's the only honest way to shoot a threshold you can't pan to.
Concepts in play
- out-of-field-relative — The tunnel-of-light aesthetic: a narrow cone carving into darkness with the frame's edges swallowed, where for most of the film the black past the beam is simply more quarry — adjacent space you could walk into.
- out-of-field-absolute — The stone gate inscribed with Dante's warning, after which the labyrinth resolves into a literal descent through Hell — an outside that can no longer be located in Parisian space.
- asw-disconnection — Junctions that read as impossible to map, quick intercutting between characters' helmet-cam viewpoints to fracture space, momentary blackouts as lamps fail, and a descent cut as a one-way spiral so the viewer loses any route back.
- perception-image — No omniscient camera anywhere: every frame is motivated by a character's helmet cam or handheld unit, so framing is reactive, off-center, and obstructed by rock and bodies.
- dicisign — Edwin Hodge's Benji is the cameraman whose viewpoint we frequently share — the camera perceives a character who is himself recording, and its presence is felt as wide-angle distortion, motion blur and sensor noise.
- action-image-large-form — The Indiana-Jones-in-a-tunnel surface: Scarlett decodes a cryptic trail, assembles a team, and pursues the Philosopher's Stone — the sensory-motor circuit runs intact even as the space stops mapping.
- impulse-image — Scarlett's obsessive quest as a drive rather than a plan (her drive endangers everyone), driving the group down a slope toward exhaustion and death.
- derived-milieu — The real Catacombs of Paris as a dated, documented, municipal setting — former limestone quarries lined with remains relocated there beginning in the late eighteenth century.
- originary-world — The same stone revealed as an infernal underworld: surreal tableaux (a burning car, a flaming figure, a piano) as the 'real' catacomb dissolves into a psychologized hell built from each character's guilt.
- entropy / degradation — The film's clearest structural choice — the descent edited as a one-way, ever-deepening spiral with no return path.
- fetish — The Philosopher's Stone as the part-object that organizes the whole compulsion, an alchemical emblem drawing the party downward.
- symptom — Each character is confronted underground by a manifestation of a private sin or trauma; George, the reluctant translator, has his guilt literalized in the descent.
- demark — A ringing telephone and a piano staged in the tunnels — objects that could not literally be underground, wrenched out of any customary chain and forcing interpretation.
- onirosign — The escalating symbolic tableaux are not dated flashbacks but a psychologized underworld — an inner circuit actualized as the world the characters walk through.
- attitudes & postures — Extended handheld takes of oxygen-starved crawls through flooded and bone-choked passages; performances pitched toward physical duress and claustrophobic panic while the actors carry their own cameras.