In 2014, a crew of actors and cameramen crawled into the forbidden tunnels beneath Paris. They had no electricity. No cell reception. No working walkie-talkies. The only light came from headlamps bolted to cameras that the actors wore strapped to their bodies. For five weeks, they army-crawled through limestone passages stacked with the bones of six million dead Parisians.
The result was As Above, So Below — a found-footage horror film that critics mostly hated and audiences gradually turned into a cult classic. On the surface, it looks like another shaky-camera haunted-tunnel movie. Beneath that surface (appropriately enough) lies something far more interesting: a carefully constructed allegory built on Hermetic philosophy, Dante’s Inferno, and genuine alchemical doctrine.
This article cracks open the layers.
The Quest: Nicolas Flamel and the Philosopher’s Stone
The film’s protagonist, Scarlett Marlowe (Perdita Weeks), is an archaeologist with a fixation inherited from her dead father: finding the Philosopher’s Stone created by Nicolas Flamel. She has multiple degrees, speaks six languages, and carries the kind of obsessive drive that borders on recklessness. In the opening sequence, she breaks into collapsing Iranian caves to retrieve the Rose Key — an artifact she needs to decode a riddle on Flamel’s tombstone.
The real Nicolas Flamel was a 14th-century Parisian scribe. He copied manuscripts for a living, married a woman named Perenelle, and died in 1418 at the respectable age of about eighty-eight. Nothing in the historical record connects him to alchemy. That part — the legend of a humble copyist who cracked the secret of transmutation and achieved immortality — appeared two hundred years after his death, planted in 17th-century texts that fabricated an elaborate backstory.
The fabrication stuck. Flamel became the most famous alchemist who never practiced alchemy. His house still stands at 51 rue de Montmorency in Paris, now a restaurant. His tombstone, carved with images of Christ, Saint Peter, and Saint Paul, sits in the Musée de Cluny. Neither building contains a Philosopher’s Stone. The film uses this gap between history and myth as its foundation — Scarlett chases a legend that was always already fiction.
The Emerald Tablet: Where the Title Comes From
Most viewers assume the title references Dante. It doesn’t — at least not directly.
“As above, so below” paraphrases the second verse of the Emerald Tablet, a short Hermetic text attributed to the mythical figure Hermes Trismegistus. The earliest surviving versions appear in Arabic manuscripts from the late 8th or early 9th century. Medieval Latin translations introduced it to European scholars, who treated it as the foundational document of alchemy.
The original Arabic doesn’t actually say that what is above and what is below are “like” each other. It says they come “from” one another. The distinction matters. This isn’t a metaphor about similarity — it’s a claim about origin. The universe above and the world below share the same source. The macrocosm generates the microcosm, and the microcosm regenerates the macrocosm. They’re the same process seen from different angles.
Hortulanus, a 14th-century commentator, read the Tablet as an encoded recipe for producing the Philosopher’s Stone. Later interpreters expanded its meaning into a general principle: whatever exists in the cosmos has a corresponding expression in the individual soul. To understand the stars, look inward. To understand yourself, look up.
The film deploys this idea literally. In the catacombs, the group finds a Star of David drawn on the ceiling — three points above, three below. It marks a hidden passage in the floor. From that point forward, the tunnels they descend through become a mirror of the tunnels they already passed through, but reversed and corrupted. The architecture above generates the architecture below. The same, but wrong.
V.I.T.R.I.O.L. — The Alchemist’s Instruction Manual
Written on the walls of the tunnels, partially obscured by centuries of grime, the film scatters references to V.I.T.R.I.O.L. — one of alchemy’s most recognizable acronyms.
It stands for Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem: “Visit the interior of the earth, and by rectifying what you find there, you will discover the hidden stone.”
The phrase first appeared in the work of Basilius Valentinus, a 15th-century alchemist (or possibly a fictional persona created by Johann Thölde — the attribution remains disputed). On its surface, V.I.T.R.I.O.L. describes a laboratory procedure: dig into the earth, extract raw materials, purify them through repeated distillation, and you’ll produce the Philosopher’s Stone.
But the acronym operates on a second register. “Visit the interior of the earth” also means descend into yourself. “Rectify what you find there” means confront and purify your own corruption. “The hidden stone” isn’t a rock — it’s a transformed self. The alchemist who completes the Great Work doesn’t just transmute lead into gold. The alchemist becomes the gold.
As Above, So Below takes this literally. Scarlett’s team descends into the earth. They discover a stone — a physical, glowing Philosopher’s Stone sitting on a pedestal. She takes it. It works for a while, healing wounds and performing minor miracles. Then it stops working. The stone she grabbed was a fake, or rather, it was the wrong kind of real.
The film’s resolution hinges on Scarlett returning the physical stone and recognizing that its power was never in the object. She carries the stone inside herself. She always did. The alchemical acronym spelled out the plot from the beginning. They just had to read it correctly.
Nine Floors Down: Dante’s Architecture of Hell
While the title comes from Hermes Trismegistus, the structure comes from Dante Alighieri.
In the Inferno, Dante enters Hell through a gate bearing the inscription Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate — “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.” He descends through nine concentric circles, each punishing a specific category of sin. He cannot escape by turning back. The only way out of Hell is through it — all the way down to the frozen center, past Satan himself, and out the other side.
The film recreates this architecture underground. The group discovers a passage marked with Dante’s inscription, carved into stone. Below that point, the catacombs reorganize themselves into something that isn’t quite Paris anymore. Rooms repeat but reversed. Objects from the surface world appear in wrong contexts. And each character begins to encounter manifestations of their worst guilt:
George (Ben Feldman) sees his younger brother, who drowned while George watched and failed to save him. Papillon (François Civil) confronts a burning car — the memory of someone he abandoned to die. Scarlett keeps meeting her father, who hanged himself when she was a child. She had ignored his final phone call.
These encounters don’t play out as simple jump scares (though the film has plenty of those). They function as Dantean contrapasso — the punishment mirrors the sin. George failed to pull someone from water; he’s now trapped underground and sinking deeper. Papillon left someone burning; fire follows him. Scarlett refused to answer a call for help; now the dead keep calling.
The escape follows Dante’s blueprint exactly. The survivors don’t climb back up. They confess their sins, jump through a dark hole at the bottom of everything, and emerge through a manhole cover near Notre-Dame. They went through Hell. They came out on the other side.
The Real Catacombs: 300 Kilometers of Bone and Limestone
The production accomplished something no film had managed before: shooting in the actual Paris Catacombs, including sections closed to the public.
The catacombs began as limestone quarries, mined since Roman times. By the late 18th century, central Paris sat on top of a honeycomb of empty tunnels, and the ground was starting to collapse — entire streets swallowed into sinkholes overnight. Simultaneously, the city’s cemeteries were overflowing. The Cimetière des Saints-Innocents, used continuously for a thousand years, was so overstuffed that basement walls in neighboring buildings burst under the pressure of decomposing remains.
In 1786, the authorities began transferring bones into the old quarries. The process continued for decades. By the end, roughly six million skeletons lined the tunnels — skulls and femurs stacked in careful patterns along walls that stretch for about 300 kilometers beneath the city. Only a tiny fraction — about 1.5 kilometers — is open to tourists. The rest is technically illegal to enter, though that has never stopped the cataphiles, the community of Parisians who regularly explore the forbidden passages.
The Dowdle brothers secured permission the night before their scheduled first shoot underground. For five weeks, the cast and crew worked in conditions that no Hollywood soundstage could replicate. No electricity. No cell reception. No walkie-talkies or wireless monitors — the stone absorbed every signal. The only light was whatever the actors carried. They filmed with Red Epic cameras and Panasonics mounted on helmets, often crawling through passages too narrow to stand in.
Drew Dowdle later noted that after twenty days underground, people began to unravel slightly. The air was wrong. The acoustics were wrong. Sounds traveled through stone in ways that made direction impossible to judge. The cast didn’t need to act claustrophobic. They just needed to keep filming.
The Star of David on the Ceiling: A Key Hidden in Plain Sight
One of the film’s most elegant details appears at the threshold of Hell.
Before passing through Dante’s gate, the group finds a hexagram — the Star of David — drawn on the ceiling. In the context of the film, it represents the Hermetic maxim: what is above mirrors what is below. The upward-pointing triangle and the downward-pointing triangle interlock into one figure. Heaven and Hell. Surface and depth. The conscious mind and the shadow beneath it.
But the symbol also functions as a spoiler the characters can’t read. The hexagram has six points: three above, three below. Six people descend into the tunnels. Three will make it back to the surface. Three will remain trapped below.
The film doesn’t draw attention to this. There’s no dramatic close-up, no character explaining the geometry. The symbol appears, the group walks past it, and the audience — if they catch it — carries the dread forward with them.
From Critical Failure to Cult Classic
As Above, So Below opened on August 29, 2014, earning around $41 million worldwide against a $5 million budget. The math worked. The reviews didn’t.
Rotten Tomatoes aggregated a 26% critics’ score. Reviewers dismissed it as derivative found-footage filler, arriving at the tail end of a cycle that had worn out its welcome years before. The shaky cameras, the night-vision sequences, the characters who keep filming when any rational person would drop the camera and run — all standard complaints about the format landed on this film with particular force.
Audiences saw something different. Over the following years, As Above, So Below accumulated a vocal cult following. Viewers who watched it casually the first time returned for second and third viewings and found architecture they’d missed: the Dante parallels, the alchemical framework, the hexagram prophecy, the V.I.T.R.I.O.L. encoded into the set design. Forums filled with analysis. The film turned out to reward close reading in a way that most horror — and certainly most found-footage horror — simply doesn’t.
Perdita Weeks anchors the whole operation. Scarlett Marlowe could have been a stock action-adventure archetype — the Lara Croft knockoff in a tunnel. Weeks plays her as something more unsettling: genuinely brilliant, genuinely driven, and genuinely dangerous to everyone around her, including herself. Her refusal to turn back isn’t courage. It’s compulsion. She inherited her father’s obsession along with his research, and the film is smart enough to let that inheritance cut both ways.
The Mad Alchemist’s Reflection
As Above, So Below smuggles a functioning alchemical treatise into a genre film. The Emerald Tablet provides the cosmology. V.I.T.R.I.O.L. provides the method. Dante provides the map. And Nicolas Flamel — a real man buried under a legend he never asked for — provides the MacGuffin that gets everyone underground.
The Philosopher’s Stone, in the end, turns out to be what the alchemists always said it was. Not a rock. Not a substance. A state of being that only emerges after you’ve descended into the worst parts of yourself and come through the other side.
The surface and the depths. The stars and the bones. The sin and the confession.
As above, so below.
