Horror, Monsters and Puzzles: Rewriting Tomb Raider in As Above, So Below

The franchise Tomb Raider includes many video games but transmedia iterations as well, such as comics and films. So far, the adventures of Lara Croft have been brought to the big screen in three films…or maybe four. This essay argues that the horror film As Above, So Below (John Erick Dowdle, 2016) is a rewriting of the Tom Raider’s franchise. The film centres on Scarlett (Perdita Weeks), a Lara-like young and beautiful archaeologist who, together with a group of urban spelunkers break into the catacombs below Paris in search of an arcane philosopher’s stone that purportedly holds the powers of eternal life. Unfortunately, the group becomes trapped in a labyrinth of caves that lead them deeper and deeper into the earth… and closer and closer towards the gates of hell. To scape, Scarlett must face horrors and solve many puzzles though her path under Paris. The transmedia iterations of the Tomb Raider franchise emphasise adventures while downplaying one of the elements that made the video games so popular: horror. Lara faces dinosaurs and a big variety of monsters though her adventures, and Dowle’s film explores the horror elements present through the franchise. Transmedia adaptation means more than the classic concept of adaptation and the (somehow simplistic and contested) unidirectional transposition from one medium to another one and the ‘fidelity imperative’ as quality criteria (Ritterbusch, 2020, p. 60). Transmedia means that either a narrative or a media is expanded in new directions (Rampazzo Gambarato et al., 2020, p. 1).