What Waits Below

What Waits Below (1984)

Underground, no-one can hear you die!

The US military is running a test for a special type of radio transmitter, to be used to communicate with submarines, in a deep system of underground caves in Central America. When the signal from one of the transmitters suddenly disappears, a team of soldiers led by Major Elbert Stevens and cave specialists led by Rupert 'Wolf' Wolfsen including scientist Leslie Peterson are sent in to find out what happened. Exploring deep underground, they stumble upon a tribe of albino cave-dwellers who have apparently been isolated from the rest of the world for thousands of years. The cave-dwellers are hurt by radio frequencies and are able to see in infra-red frequencies, tracking the explorers by their body heat.

Date of release
1984-11-19
TMDB
4.1 / 10 (23)
Runtime
1h 28m
Genres
Horror, Adventure, Science Fiction
Director
Don Sharp

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Alabama

What Waits Below, also known as Secrets of the Phantom Caverns, is a 1984 British-American fantasy adventure film directed by Don Sharp, and starring Robert Powell, Timothy Bottoms and Lisa Blount. In it, a group of soldiers enter a cave to plant an electronic transmitter, but encounter humanoids who have evolved differently, and may be the last survivors of the lost Lemurian civilization. It was Sharp's final theatrical film. It was shot under the title Secrets of the Phantom Caverns, which it kept in the U.K. and some international markets, but premiered in the U.S. as What Waits Below.

Production

The film had the working title The Primitives. The story is credited to Ken Barnett, the usual pseudonym of Trog director and Sandy Howard collaborator Freddie Francis. Sandy Howard invited Robert D. Bailey, whose background was in special effects, to join him as a producer on the film. The production used a legal entity called Wishred, based in Culver City, California.

The film was announced to start in April 1983, before being delayed. Until late into pre-production, Yugoslavia was the shoot's likely location, and the Postojna Caves (in what is today Slovenia) had been worked into the script. When the production retreated the U.S., Kentucky's Mammoth Cave and New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns were scouted, before the final locations were announced in June 1983.

Some sources mention that John Hough was considered as director before Don Sharp signed on. Claude Agostini was hired as cinematographer thanks to his work on the similar Quest for Fire, and brought some of his French crew with him. The film was originally going to be shot in 70 mm, but instead used the more traditional 35 mm format.

Filming started in on August 8, 1983. Two weeks and a half were spent in the North Alabama, mostly at the Cathedral Caverns near Grant, but also at Three Caves, a former limestone quarry in Huntsville. The crew then moved to the McMinnville, Tennessee, area for two weeks at Cumberland Caverns and the nearby Fall Creek Falls. In early September the crew south moved to Sherwood for the final stretch of location filming.

80 percent of the film was shot inside the caves. Lisa Blount said: "We would go into the caverns before dawn, stay there all day, and come out at night, so we never saw the sunlight, except for Sunday. " Don Sharp said that the crew spent as much as 14 hours straight in the cave. While this offered an agreeable summer temperature of just 56 °F (13 °C), it made lighting technically demanding.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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