Life imitates horror movie as trapped teens spend 3 days in Paris catacombs

By Sam Barsanti | June 15, 2017 | 1:54am

Aux Features Film

Life can be pretty scary these days, but it rarely mirrors the plot of a horror movie as thoroughly as it recently did for two French teenagers who got stuck in the Paris catacombs for three days. According to BBC News, the boys—one 16, the other 17—descended into the catacombs on Saturday night, and the police launched a rescue effort three days later. It’s unclear how or when the police realized the boys were stuck underground, but pulling them out reportedly took four hours. They were both suffering from “severe cold,” but other than the nightmares they’ll probably have, they’re “otherwise unharmed.” Either way, the experience was probably a little bit better than the lousy 2014 horror film As Above, So Below.

For those who have somehow managed to remain blissfully unaware of one of the spookiest places on Earth, the Paris catacombs are a complex series of interconnected tunnels and rooms that contain the bones of about six million people. Some of them are arranged to form little walls that wouldn’t look out of place in a Castlevania game, some are buried more traditionally, and some comprise the fully reanimated skeletons that stalk the corridors in search of wayward Parisians. Only a little bit of the catacombs are actually open to the public, but when you have a system of tunnels as cool and spooky as these, you know people are going to break into the closed sections to—as BBC puts it—”hold secret parties.”