Saturday, October 31, 2015

2015 October Horror Challenge #98 "As Above, So Below"



This is another movie I've been impatiently waiting to watch for awhile now.  Just the title sounded haunting to me, so I was sure that I'd like it, and I decided to wait until Halloween to watch it, since I had an idea that it would be really scary, and I wanted to save my scariest movies for Halloween (which seemed like a great idea at the time, but now I've watched both this and "It Follows" and I may never sleep again).

I didn't know anything about this movie going in.  Again, I swore all my friends to secrecy under penalty of death to keep them from spoiling the movie, and when I bought it, I didn't even read the cover.  You ain't spoiling me, goddammit.  The result is that all I knew was that the movie was of the "found footage" type, and it had something to do with archeology students.

It turns out that only one if those things is totally true, the other is only partly right, and I was grateful that I hadn't read much about the movie, because everything came as a surprise that way. The actors do a great job here, and though I kind of wanted to stab them, I still felt for them and the horrible situation in which they find themselves.  The movie does a much better job of explaining why everyone kept filming, too (the cameras are attached to their headlamps, so as long as the lights were turned on, they were filming, and you need light to see in dark tunnels, so it makes sense).

The atmosphere is great here, too.  The catacombs are creepy all by themselves, without even needing evil spirits or curses to make them scary.  Plus for someone who's claustrophobic like me, seeing people crawl through small tunnels makes my heart race.  Damn movie. I also had some help being scared here, since there's one scene where the characters suffer a crash, and the sound goes out on their cameras, and there's nothing but a "ringing in your ears" type noise.  My ears picked thst moment to clog up and start ringing.  It's probably just sinus pressure, but it almost made me pee my pants.  In case you couldn't tell, I loved this movie, even the ending.  It's not perfect, but it's close enough for me.

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