![]() ![]() The deceased are an ever-present and noisy presence in Archive 81, and Sonnenshine further accentuates the spectral mood through references to a variety of supernatural classics-Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House-having to do with haunted abodes, grieving loners, and restless ghosts.ĭirected by Rebecca Thomas ( Stranger Things), Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson ( The Endless, Marvel’s upcoming Moon Knight) and Haifaa Al-Mansour ( Mary Shelley), Archive 81 looks great and moves at an urgent pace, and it piles on homages (my favorite is a nod to Daniel Mann’s 1971 Willard) and supernatural elements with delirious gusto. ![]() Steven Turner (Charlie Hudson III), who perished along with the rest of Dan’s clan in a bizarre conflagration. Moreover, Dan soon learns that he may be connected to Melody via his father Dr. ![]() The more Dan watches Melody’s tapes, the more he’s drawn into her investigation into the Visser-and, consequently, the more he grows suspicious of the motives of Davenport, whose LMG is a shadow corporation, and whose research bunker is outfitted with security cameras (the better for Davenport to keep an eye on his employee) and rife with secret rooms, hidden passageways, and off-limits basements. Alas, it quickly became clear to Melody that Samuel was possibly wrapped up with this covert cabal, whose operations may have also taken place on a forbidden sixth floor, as well as had something to do with the wealthy Vos family, whose mansion burned to the ground in 1924 and was replaced by the Visser. With the aid of 14-year-old Jess (Ariana Neal), who served as her tour guide, Melody met many of these individuals, none more charming and welcoming than Samuel (Evan Jonigkeit). What he discovers in Melody’s tapes, however, is more than he bargained for, since Melody’s time in the Visser led to some startling revelations, beginning with the fact that many of the residents enjoyed getting together to rhythmically chant, huff and hum in devoted prayer to a monstrous statue like demented cultists. Thus Archive 81 establishes its found-footage set-up, with Dan functioning as both a viewer and the spiritual collaborator of Melody, whose non-fiction work he’s helping to complete. In light of his expertise, Dan is contacted by Virgil Davenport (Martin Donovan), who runs a mysterious firm known as LMG, about a private job: relocate to a remote Catskills research facility and repair a collection of camcorder tapes that were shot by Melody Pendras (Dina Shihabi), who in 1994 was making a documentary film about Manhattan’s Visser apartment building when the place went up in flames.ĭan, whose best friend Mark (Matt McGorry) is the host of a spooky podcast dubbed Mystery Signals, accepts this offer, and promptly sets up shop in Davenport’s eerie concrete-walled facility, immersing himself in Melody’s recordings. With patient and meticulous care, he untangles, cleans and respools ravaged celluloid and VHS material, bringing long-moribund relics back to life. 14) charts the ordeal of Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie), an employee at Queens, New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, where he’s renowned for restoring and digitizing damaged old movies. Taking a kitchen-sink approach to scary storytelling, it cleverly and entertainingly resurrects, and reinvents, that which came before it.įollowing in the footsteps of John Carpenter’s Masters of Horror anthology entry Cigarette Burns, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Joel Schumacher’s 8mm, Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio-as well as The Blair Witch Projectand its legion of found-footage progeny (notably, the V/H/S franchise)- Archive 81 (Jan. The notion that the movies are a transportive portal is nothing particularly new-especially in the horror genre-but showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine and executive producer James Wan’s eight-part Netflix series (based on Daniel Powell and Marc Sollinger’s podcast of the same name) nonetheless finds new ways to enliven its underlying idea, along the way paying tribute to the many chilling ancestors that paved the way for its malevolent tale about a young man tasked with restoring video tapes about a calamity that befell a community decades earlier. In Archive 81, cinema is a figurative and literal gateway to other worlds. ![]()
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