Little Schmidt Productions
As Above, So Below
Feature Film · 2014
The only way out is deeper.
The Production
Overview
The Story
As Above, So Below sends an archaeological quest beneath Paris and gradually transforms it into a descent through personal guilt, occult symbolism and a physical world that no longer follows ordinary geography.
Scarlett Marlowe is an archaeologist driven by the work that consumed her late father. Her search centres on the philosopher's stone, the legendary alchemical object associated with Nicolas Flamel. A clue recovered in Iran leads her to Paris, where she reunites with George, a scholar and former companion whose knowledge of languages and history becomes essential to deciphering the trail.
With cameraman Benji documenting the expedition, Scarlett follows the clues toward the Catacombs of Paris. The official tunnels do not provide the route she needs, so the group joins Papillon, Souxie and Zed — explorers familiar with the forbidden underground network.
The descent initially behaves like dangerous urban exploration. Passages narrow, routes collapse and the enormous ossuary surrounds the group with the remains of generations of Parisians. Then the tunnels begin producing things that should not exist: a telephone ringing deep underground, people from the past, repeated spaces and manifestations connected to the travellers' private histories.
The search for Flamel's stone gives the journey an adventure structure, but the deeper movement becomes increasingly psychological. Scarlett's obsession with completing her father's work, George's guilt surrounding his brother and the unresolved histories of other members of the group are no longer memories left above ground. The environment turns them into physical encounters.
The film repeatedly uses the Hermetic idea contained in its title — relationships between what exists above and what exists below — while its downward journey echoes a descent through an infernal landscape. Paris remains physically overhead, yet the farther the group travels, the less useful normal maps and directions become.
That structure gives the film an unusual reversal. In most underground survival stories, escape means climbing back toward the entrance. Here, the group eventually has to accept that retreat is impossible. The route out requires continuing downward and passing through the logic of the place rather than simply retracing their steps.
The final movement brings the title into physical form. After travelling farther beneath Paris than should be possible, the survivors emerge through the ground into the city above — turning the descent itself into the route back to the surface.
The Production Challenge
How do you build claustrophobia when the location already provides it?
The production did something unusually valuable for this story: it went underground. Rather than recreating the entire Catacombs of Paris as conventional sets, the filmmakers worked in real catacomb and quarry systems. The restrictions of those spaces — darkness, narrow passages, unreliable communications and difficult access — became part of the film's visual language.
Geography as Story
The underground environment is not a backdrop to the narrative. Its confined routes, irregular surfaces and physical depth shape how the expedition — and the audience — experiences the descent.
Visibility as Suspense
Darkness becomes part of the point of view. What the characters can illuminate determines what the camera can reveal, allowing fear to emerge from restricted perception rather than conventional coverage.
Restriction as Method
The location naturally favoured a compact, documentary-style approach, aligning the practical realities of the shoot with the film's found-footage language.
The Descent
Main Cast
The group enters the tunnels for different reasons — scholarship, filmmaking, exploration or simply helping Scarlett — but the deeper journey turns each character's history into part of the environment.
Perdita Weeks
Scarlett MarloweAn archaeologist and scholar whose search for the philosopher's stone continues the work that dominated her father's life. Scarlett's determination drives the expedition even after the tunnels become demonstrably dangerous.
Ben Feldman
GeorgeA scholar with expertise useful to deciphering Scarlett's clues. His history with Scarlett and unresolved guilt surrounding his younger brother become increasingly important as the catacombs begin reflecting the group's past.
Edwin Hodge
BenjiThe cameraman documenting Scarlett's expedition. His presence provides an in-story reason for the recorded perspective while making the camera itself part of how the group navigates and observes the tunnels.
François Civil
PapillonA Parisian explorer familiar with the unofficial underground network. Papillon provides local knowledge needed to reach areas Scarlett cannot access through the public catacombs.
Marion Lambert
SouxieA member of Papillon's group who accompanies the expedition into the restricted tunnels, moving from experienced underground exploration into phenomena no local knowledge can explain.
Ali Marhyar
ZedAnother member of the Parisian exploration group, helping guide the outsiders through an environment where unofficial routes and local experience initially seem more useful than conventional maps.
Behind the Production
Paris above.
Six stories below.
The Dowdle brothers built the production around Paris itself, combining authorised access to catacomb and quarry systems with above-ground city locations and controlled stage work. Each environment performed a different production job while preserving one continuous descent beneath the city.
The location was not pretending to be claustrophobic.
The filmmakers obtained access to real catacomb spaces, including areas normally off limits. Walls, low ceilings, bones and narrow passages therefore have physical irregularity that would be difficult to reproduce accidentally on a clean studio build.
The location also restricted the filmmakers. Crew and equipment had to fit the tunnels, turning production limitations into part of the film's documentary immediacy.
Different tunnels performed different production jobs.
The production used multiple underground systems rather than treating the catacombs as one uniform space. Quarry areas offered greater flexibility for sequences that could not practically be staged among fragile historic remains.
The Dowdles specifically described being able to bring a car into the quarry system and burn it — an example of matching a screen environment to the technical demands of a scene.
The city makes the underground feel deeper.
Above-ground Paris establishes recognisable architecture, streets and historical context before the film descends. Once below, the absence of daylight and exterior geography becomes more powerful because the audience remembers the living city directly overhead.
The contrast also gives the ending its impact: emerging into Paris reconnects an increasingly impossible underground journey with an unmistakably real place.
Little Schmidt Productions
Production
Contribution.
On a location-driven feature such as As Above, So Below, access and practical assessment are inseparable from the filmmaking method. Within the wider production process, Little Schmidt Productions contributed location and production support focused on the practical requirements surrounding restricted real-world environments.
The right underground space depends on what the scene needs to do.
Historic tunnels, public catacombs and quarry systems may appear related on screen while offering very different practical possibilities. Location work connects visual continuity with access, safety and scene requirements.
Restricted environments require more than a location address.
Permissions, authorities, access routes and operating limitations become fundamental production questions when filming beneath a major city in historically sensitive spaces.
Underground conditions decide what equipment can actually reach the set.
Narrow passages, lack of electricity and unreliable wireless signals affect cameras, monitoring, lighting, communications and crew movement. Production support helps creative plans remain workable within those constraints.
Sometimes the production value is already in the walls.
Real stone, irregular passages and historic remains carry texture that does not need to be manufactured. The production challenge becomes protecting and photographing that environment while allowing it to remain recognisably itself.
Inside the Production
The location became
the filmmaking language.
The film's most distinctive production decisions are connected: real tunnels encouraged a small unit; the small unit suited documentary-style photography; limited infrastructure encouraged practical headlamps; and those lights made the darkness feel motivated by the characters rather than imposed by a horror-film lighting scheme.
Instead of building a perfect version of the catacombs, the production adapted itself to the imperfect reality of filming inside them.
Claustrophobia becomes a working condition.
The filmmakers described spending five weeks underground during the Paris shoot. Long periods below street level meant cold, darkness, confined passages and limited facilities were experienced by performers and crew as practical realities.
That does not replace performance, but it gives the actors genuine physical information — walls are actually close, routes are genuinely narrow and the environment cannot simply be moved away between takes.
The characters carry much of the light themselves.
With no ordinary electrical supply in the tunnels, the production leaned into practical illumination and a documentary approach. Headlamps and camera-associated sources allow faces and walls to emerge from darkness according to where characters look and move.
The limitation creates suspense naturally: if the light does not reach an area, neither the character nor the audience can confidently know what is there.
Thick stone changes how a film crew communicates.
The Dowdles described monitor signals and communications becoming unreliable underground. Conventional separation between camera, director and larger crew becomes harder when stone and distance interfere with wireless systems.
A smaller production footprint was therefore not merely stylistic. It was compatible with an environment that physically resisted ordinary filmmaking infrastructure.
The camera belongs inside the expedition.
Benji's role as cameraman and the use of character-carried recording devices make imperfect framing, sudden movement and restricted visibility part of the story. The audience does not watch the group from a safe cinematic distance; the viewpoint is trapped in the passage with them.
That approach also helps real locations retain their scale. A tunnel can feel tight because the camera cannot simply retreat through a wall to create a conventional composition.
Matching locations can expand what is physically possible.
Some actions would be inappropriate or impossible in historically sensitive catacomb areas. Using quarry systems that could visually belong to the same underground journey gave production greater freedom for demanding sequences.
This is a classic location-production solution: preserve the screen geography while moving specific action to the environment best able to support it.
Not every underground sequence had to remain underground.
The film's underwater material was handled on a sound stage, demonstrating the other side of the location strategy. Authenticity does not mean forcing every shot into the real environment when controlled conditions provide a safer or technically stronger solution.
The finished film can therefore move between extraordinary real access and constructed production environments without asking the audience to notice the boundary.
The Descent
History, alchemy
and personal hell.
The film's production value is not simply that cameras entered the Paris Catacombs. The location supports the story's central metaphor: archaeology is a movement into buried history, while the characters' descent turns buried personal histories into things they must physically confront.
The deeper the expedition travels beneath Paris, the less the tunnels behave like geography — and the more they behave like memory.
The adventure begins with a historical object.
Scarlett's search for the philosopher's stone gives the descent an intellectual objective before supernatural horror overtakes it. Symbols, inscriptions and translation keep scholarship active inside the genre mechanics.
Going down becomes moral as well as physical.
The journey increasingly echoes traditions of descent narratives, including imagery associated with hell and punishment. The characters do not simply encounter generic monsters; the environment confronts them with guilt and unresolved actions.
The title becomes spatial storytelling.
The film repeatedly mirrors the world above with what lies beneath it. Its final escape completes that idea physically: the survivors continue downward until direction itself appears to invert and the city above becomes reachable through the bottom of the journey.