After Brand New Cherry Flavor, a new horrifying curiosity has slipped into the Netflix catalog, to the point of finding a place at the head of the Top 10 France. So you’re all watching Dan on your screen, watching Melody on his screen. Adapted from a podcast and produced by James Wan (Saw, Conjuring), Archive 81 follows, over eight episodes, the archivist Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie) hired by the mysterious Virgil Davenport (Martin Donovan) to restore a series of damaged cassettes following a fire in the 1990s. He discovers the images shot by student Melody Pendras (Dina Shihabi), who was investigating a New York building and its tenants.
This article is not intended to spoil the rest of the series, but the evocation of the references that dot it and feed it can spoil the element of surprise. It is therefore more prudent to have seen it in full before reading the rest… at your own risk.
« Cannibal Holocaust », « Sinister », « Ring »… Found footage in all its forms
By its very device, Archive 81 refers to the form and gender of the found footage, already decrypted on
20 Minutes and whose best-known representatives are The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity Where REC. But the series is not 100% found footage and even stages the discovery of videos, as the pioneer could do Cannibal Holocaust, where a rescue expedition goes in search of reporters in the jungle and comes across the rolls of what they have filmed.
More recently, Sinister took up the concept and saw Ethan Hawke, author of novels inspired by real events, settling in a house with a tragic past and discovering a box of 8mm reels and, on it, horrible murders. With the idea that the film, the screen, is a border, a door, between reality and fantasy. Like also the cursed cassette of Ring. Moreover, the viewer very often finds himself, like Dan, scrutinizing the images shot by Melody on the lookout for the slightest clue, the slightest manifestation. An attitude, an investment, typical in front of the films of Kiyoshi Kurasawa in general, and of Kairo specifically.
With the found footage, the snuff movie is never far, and Archive 81 also seizes the subject, such as the films Thesis of Alexander Amenabar et 8mm with Nicholas Cage.
“Rosemary’s Baby”, “Shining”… Welcome to the haunted house
If form is important in Archive 81, so is the place. Or rather the places. The old building, “The Visser”, where Melody settles, is a character in its own right and recalls that of Rosemary’s Baby of Roman Polanski, with its tenants with strange behavior and perhaps all accomplices of a plot. See the inhabitants of “Visser gather to pray to a statue straight out of The Exorcist is the beginning of an answer. Similarly, by chance and this is one of the facilities of the series, Dan quickly finds himself isolated in a research center lost in the middle of nowhere, perfect for freaking out like Jack Nicholson at the Overlook Hotel in Shining.
Sect, witches, demon, exorcism, parallel worlds… Archive 81 juggles with several other figures of the genre. Maybe all of them. He even ends up evoking other Netflix series, themselves under influence, like Stranger Things, Dark Where The OA. Its originality, and its success, is due to its characters and their reactions, and to an unwavering belief in genre cinema, and in the power of images.
And you, Archive 81 what horror movies and series made you think of?
