Analysing Horror - As Above So Below

As Above So Below is a found footage horror film directed by John Erick Dowdle in 2014. It is set in the catacombs of Paris, where a team of explorers are hunting for Nicholas Flamel's philosophers stone. However, they also uncover the dark secrets that live in the city of the dead.

What I really liked about this film was the constant use of a found footage style. It's supposed to be a documentary of the experience, and it therefore immerses the viewer in what is going on. This made the film incredibly intense and exciting as you were seeing what the characters saw. This would link in with Blumler and Katz's uses and gratifications theory in the point that the audience want to identify with the characters of the situation.

I also really liked the tension it created with so few "jump scares", instead playing with psychological fears such as claustrophobia and guilt of deaths. However, I felt that the ending wasn't as good as it could have been, relying too much on a supernatural element when it had started off with a more natural style.



I first found out about the film through a promotional YouTube video by Felix Kjellberg (aka PewDiePie). He embarked on a quest through the catacombs with his girlfriend where they were scared in multiple ways, creating an almost real life horror game.

Conventions of Horror

Our Concept - Slender Man

Our trailer is to be based around the concept of a popular Internet meme known as Slender Man.

Created in 2009 on the Something Awful forum by Eric Knudsen (a.k.a Victor Surge), Slender Man was formed for a photoshop contest where users were to create supernatural images. To increase the overall effect, Knudsen added snippets of text that were supposedly from witnesses. It was a hit and soon went viral, fanart, cosplay and fanfiction (known as creepy pastas) jumping from site to site and gradually losing contact with it's original creator. In 2012, the "myth" of Slender Man was formed into a video game named Slender Man: The Eight Pages, and within the first month it had accumulated 2 million downloads, leading on to more variants of the game that included Slender Man for iOS and the sequel, Slender Man: The Arrival (2013).

What made Slender Man so popular was the flexibility of the concept and the highly collaborative nature. People can edit and adapt the story and images due to the mystery behind it's creation and author. In a sense, Slender Man could be considered similar to a campfire story, or urban legend, as Andrew Peck suggests, the story teller able to claim a sense of ownership over their version of the myth.

The concept of Slender Man has become so popular, and the lines between fantasy and reality so blurred, that there have even been cases of Slender Man - related incidents. In 2014, two 12 year old girls held down a classmate and stabbed her multiple times. When later questioned, the two claimed that they were following steps to become Slender Man's "proxies"after reading about it online. Later that same year, another girl of 14 supposedly set fire to her house with her mother and younger brother inside with possible connections to Slender Man who she seemed infatuated with. These are just two examples of cases that have been related to the concept, proving the cultural impact it has had on a generation of technology natives.

Our Vision Sheet

Iconic Directors of Horror Films

History of the Horror Film Genre

Changing Genre

Our group was set on trying to make an intelligent thriller with certain shots, and this was our downfall. We were so focused on two particular shots we were trying to form a narrative around them and it just was not working. So, we took a step back.

We looked at the current narrative we had and noticed that we had been using conventions that were tailored more towards a Horror film. We talked through it more with one of our teachers to find possible routes to follow, settling on a found footage style film before slowly drifting towards something influenced by today's culture and the influence of memes. Eventually we were able to create a horror film narrative based on the concept of Slenderman that we hope will employ the main conventions of the genre.