WHAT WAITS BELOW. Science Fiction for Speleologists

Fans of director Don Sharp’s films will likely recognize him from at least two titles – Tears in the Rain and Bear Island. These are by no means guilty VHS hits, but full-fledged action and melodramatic films. You shouldn’t expect to find connections to science fiction, as Sharp was never a specialist in the genre. Perhaps that’s why he managed to skillfully and effortlessly combine horror, adventure, and science fiction—both on Earth and underground, in caves. It’s rare to encounter adventure and sci-fi films set in such a self-contained world, so What Waits Below is even a valuable, interesting film for this reason. The story is so well told that it draws you in, for me, it’s on the same level as Indiana Jones from that era.

As befits a lower-budget film, What Waits Below doesn’t exceed 90 minutes in runtime. Of course, this is not a science fiction movie for speleologists. The slight irony of the title was meant to highlight the uniqueness of Don Sharp’s production theme. The majority of screen time is spent underground, in a mysterious cave that the military has chosen for testing a modern communication system or even a weapon element. The problem is that the cave is already inhabited by someone who doesn’t want to be disturbed. At this point, some of you might remember the Morlock race from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. The Lemurians are somewhat similar to them, although intelligent. They are wild, pale like albinos, and follow a more animalistic morality—one to which humans are also capable of adhering, but which they have effectively hidden under the guise of civilization.

This is even reflected in the human characters, a distinction the director and screenwriters made clear by showing how different the scientific approach to reality is from the exploitative attitude of the military team. The main character is Rupert Wolf (Robert Powell), a speleologist, mercenary, and man with a war-torn past, who understands life deeply even though he operates on its margins. He’s reminiscent of Indiana Jones, though less commercial. He wears a leather jacket, carries a gun, knows how to fight, and is familiar with caves, but not extraterrestrials. It’s such a nice change for Powell to play a character like this, who I feel had been somewhat trapped by his role as Jesus in Jesus of Nazareth by Franco Zeffirelli. He didn’t have a chance to rival Harrison Ford, though, as he appeared too late in the market of New Adventure icons, and the promotional budget for his role in What Waits Below was minimal. As a result, no sequel to Wolf’s adventures was made, though I would have liked to see one in the 1980s with a bigger budget. Certainly not by Don Sharp, with all due respect to him as a director.

From today’s perspective, however, it makes no sense for any new Wolf character to appear in cinemas. This type of hero is already overused, and there’s nothing in him that would appeal to younger audiences in a popular, comic-book way. So a remake is pointless. What Waits Below must remain a cinematic curiosity, hidden away for those rare fans of VHS treasures. I watched this film after many years and rediscovered it. It kept me on edge, was dark, ascetic, and I waited a long time for the first encounter with the cave’s inhabitants, but the relationships between the characters made up for the time. What’s more, that encounter was incredible. There was no grandiose dialogue, no inter-species moralizing; most of the important conclusions were shown to the audience without words, only through the characters’ actions. A particularly important reflection is about the civilizational conquest of our home planet.

It can be assumed that the Lemurians arrived here a very long time ago. Perhaps by accident, perhaps on purpose, but the important thing is that they survived and populated the cave system. They gave up their technology and adopted a hunter-gatherer culture, from which our own civilization also emerged. However, throughout these supposed thousands of years, the Lemurians maintained a respect for the natural order of their environment, whereas we, in some important and attention-grabbing way, have lost it.

The director wanted to show, through the encounter between humans and Lemurians, how far we are from wise stewardship of the Earth, how biologically weak we are in comparison, and yet how arrogant we remain. This is not, however, an image of all of humanity, so generalizations shouldn’t be made.

People still have a chance to stop being parasites and live in their civilized caves, taking care of their surroundings, just like the Lemurians did. And they don’t have to pay the price of backwardness like the visitors did in order to do something good for the planet. Sometimes, it’s enough to leave the wild as it is, in the state it wants to be, and not convince others by sword and fire that the new culture is better. It doesn’t need to replace the old, but wisely modify it to survive for many more years.