Going Underground: Caves and films

One of the most recognisable underground scenes in cinema is Orson Welles’ pursuit at the end of The Third Man. Harried by the military police as a consequence of his racketeering Welles’ character scurries beneath post-war Vienna, lit masterfully by cinematographer Robert Krasker. A perfect cave scene except for one point, it’s actually set in a sewer.

All number and manner of sequences in films explore the dark below our feet but rarely will a film spend the majority of its duration underground. The cave in question will be a climatic end point (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) or a diversion along the way (the Moria section of Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring). Once again though both the examples used above are not strictly speaking naturally formed caves. Vast numbers of films are set in confined claustrophobic spaces but relatively few are set in natural caves or caverns.

Films are made by capturing and manipulating light so unlit spaces such as caves present somewhat of a problem to the average film. One can set any number of encounters underground but without a light source for more than a few scenes the question occurs whether one is actually watching a film or enduring some unexpected audio-visual exhibition. Unsurprisingly horror as a genre is quite at home in a cave or similar environment exploiting fully the gap between what one can see and what one thinks might be lurking just out of sight.

Although he wrote many of his books before the birth of cinema, Jules Verne overcame these challenges memorably in Journey to the Centre of the Earth by granting his intrepid explorers a gigantic ocean filled cavern illuminated by ‘something in the nature of the aurora borealis’. The film version in 1959 then expanded on this by giving the protagonists a light emitting fungus to light up the geological concocted studio wonders. Several films have since taken this to heart notably the fun yet highly derivative Kevin Connor/Doug McClure collaborations Warlords of Atlantis and At the Earth’s Core. More recently films like The Core, liberated by the burgeoning advance of computer generated images, have shown us what scientists and film-makers surmise fills our planet. The result is rarely dark, as the seemingly kaleidoscopic strata of the earth are penetrated by the intrepid explorers.

The modern cave is the man-made cave, the subway, metro or simply the sublime London version, the Underground. These urban caves which so many of us experience crop up in all manner of films from the whimsical imagination of Jean-Pierre Jeunet in Amelie to the macabre humour of John Landis in An American Werewolf in London to the more further a-field Kontrol, set in the sunless world of Hungarian subway ticket inspectors. These are the everyday caves we have grown accustomed to appearing in romantic comedies at pivotal moments such as in Sliding Doors or Crocodile Dundee. Danger is never far away though as disaster movies like Daylight remind us.

Even in reality these artificial spaces are fascinating as documentaries like Dark Days testify, throwing illumination on the sub-cultures that aggregate in such seemingly inhospitable spots as subway tunnels. Continuing the spill-over into reality in September 2004 the police in Paris discovered a fully equipped cinema in a large and previously uncharted cavern beneath the capital's 16th arrondissement. Used by La Mexicaine de la Perforation, a group of urban explorers, the find took and moulded the term underground cinema to new depths.

Returning to caves, there is something feral about natural holes in the ground. A whiff of retarded nature surrounds humans who live in them. If the wall paintings are to be believed cave dwellers are after all our evolutionary ancestors or close relatives. Humans frequenting caves in more recent times carry a suspicious stigma summed up by Sawney Bean the Scottish cannibal of folklore, as if the darkness of the depths swamps the cave dwellers hearts spurring them on to darker and darker deeds. It is perhaps no coincidence that in Western culture Hell is down and Heaven is up. Films reflect this with the use of cannibals and caves in The 13th Warrior and Ravenous. Fast forward a bit and one has Death Line (aka Raw Meat), the nearly post Hammer Horror afterthought featuring Donald Pleasence’s world weary copper investigating a series of grisly murders on the Piccadilly line. The location is the Underground, our modern caves; the killer, a cannibal.

As for mines don’t get me started.

 

Descent the new film by Neil Marshall is set underground in caves, and is out on 8 July 2005.

The review can be found here...

(Head here for more infomation: www.thedescentthemovie.co.uk )

 

Notable Underground Films (Natural Caves)
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
At the Earth’s Core
Warlords of Atlantis
Cliffhanger
Vertical Limit
The Core
Touching the Void
Cave

Notable Underground Films (Artificial Caves)
The Third Man
American Werewolf in London
Subway
Dark Days
Amelie
Kontrol
Creep
And many many more…