“More camcorders, please.”
Quick disclaimer, it’s been a few weeks since I’ve finished the Netflix show Archive 81 (based on the podcast of the same name), starring Mamoudou Athie and Dina Shihabi, so I hope you’ll forgive me if I miss a few things here or there. I’m mostly going for vibes here, as it were. And I also hope you’ll forgive me that this post is coming out so late on Tuesday instead of at the usual 1:30 Central standard time. I was busy this weekend, what a surprise!
To call Archive 81 “analog horror” is, I would say, mostly accurate. It’s a show that utilizes found footage, is partially set in the mid-90’s, uses old-school technology as part of its presentation, and revolves around horror elements. These are all characteristics of analog horror as a subgenre of the larger “found footage” genre of media and, hopefully, give you a pretty good idea of what it means when I say something is analog horror. Archive 81 does all of these things, and it does all of them well, but at the same time, it’s missing the central ethos of what makes analog horror a compelling offshoot of a larger genre.
Perhaps I should back up a bit. I have zero background on what the television show of Archive 81 is or what it isn’t, I haven’t listened to the podcast that it’s based on, I don’t know where it came from, and I don’t even know if people are watching it or anything. I stumbled across it while browsing Netflix at a tattoo appointment, so I had something to take my mind off of the sting of a colored needle, and I watched the first episode and a half while getting stabbed repeatedly. And while I don’t know anything about it, nor had I heard anything about it prior to that day, I do know that I was compelled enough by the first episode to, over the next few weeks, watch the rest of the show. I even got Cheyenne interested by forcing her to watch the next couple episodes with me, which I think is really saying something.
The story revolves around a restoration archivist, Dan, trying to restore burned tapes recovered from a New York apartment fire in the 1990’s. In doing so, he discovers a web of intrigue, mystery, murder, and monsters beating at the heart of these tapes, collected by grad student Melody before she died in the fire years ago. It’s definitely a slow burn, there isn’t much action or even many outright frightening moments, but it’s tense and shot well with plenty of atmosphere, and the sound design is frighteningly fitting for a show that started as a podcast. I might even hesitate to call it a horror show; perhaps a thriller is a more appropriate description. It gets heady and confusing, with some light time travel and grand conspiracies, both of which sometimes work in its favor, and other times against it. But I think what initially drew me to is the show’s big conceit; roughly half the footage follows Dan in the modern day, and the other half follows Melody in the 90’s, from the perspective of her old video camera. And what drew me to it is the fact that this is something that I’m already kind of familiar with.
Also, I’m going to try and avoid spoiling the show too much here, because I do think it’s worth watching, but just so you know, SPOILER WARNING!
Archive 81’s found-footage camcorder shots are very much channeling stuff like The Blair Witch Project, the progenitor of found footage and ancestor to the more modern subgenre of analog horror. The image is grainy, the sound is bad, everything looks like a shitty home movie, and it’s all intentional. While I don’t think that the original Blair Witch is particularly “fun” to watch (mostly kind of dizzying), twenty-odd years later have, if anything, only heightened the dread and suspense that the film does build. Because the farther away we get from it, the more foreign those kinds of filming methods become. It’s super easy for nearly anyone to record anything on their phone, and it’ll instantly be in high definition with little-to-no loss in quality through sharing or distribution. The magic of technology today is incredible, but it makes “antique” filming, like with a camcorder or on tapes, even from just a few decades ago seem like distant relics of the past. They are something eerie, something uncomfortable in their muffled audio and hazy visuals. What’s happening in them what we can’t see? What is obscured and lost to compression? Is that a face in the corner, or is it just shitty pixels?
Blair Witch has this, but later found footage, most famously with Paranormal Activity but also with films like Cloverfield or even Unfriended, relies instead on feeling like it was recorded on someone’s iPhone, or even someone’s computer itself. And with found footage seeming to be most popular in the 00’s and early 2010’s followed by an apparent dying out of the genre, it almost feels like analog horror is trying to take found footage back to its roots in the 80’s and 90’s. Paradoxically, however, it’s modern technology that makes analog horror more accessible than ever; the best examples of it today are all YouTube videos, made by random people with low budgets and little-to-no professional credits. But instead of utilizing the modern technology to create higher-budget scares, analog horror opts for the dread found in between clarity and opacity, and the uncomfortable nature of turning something vaguely familiar into something vaguely threatening.
The first time I encountered analog horror (though this was so long ago, you might as well just call it found footage) was with Marble Hornets, an old-school YouTube series that was a much better version of a Slenderman film. I also can’t believe it’s been more than a decade since that started, too. Makes me feel old. But if you want to see the “true” start of analog horror, Local 58 is generally your best best. Specifically, the video in that link is the one that I came across first, and I think that most people came across first. It’s only a few minutes, but you can already get the gist of it from there. It’s cluttered, kind of unclear what’s happening, the monsters are almost never right out in the open, and everything feels like its under a thin layer of jank.
Gemini Home Entertainment is another prominent example of this, though perhaps the most recent example to garner significant acclaim is the Mandela Catalogue, made by some dude in Wisconsin during the pandemic when he suddenly had a bunch of free time. Getting millions of views per video, Mandela Catalogue (perhaps thanks in part to a GQ article about it) has become something of a minor cultural icon in certain online horror circles, not unlike Sirenhead. While my family wasn’t particularly impressed by it, there’s something about the Mandela Catalogue that makes me deeply uncomfortable. It could be because I first watched it alone in a cabin at work, surrounded by woods for miles, but it also could be because I think it’s a relatively effective use of building tension and subverting payoff. That being said, analog horror is also yet another example proving Stephen King’s postulation that horror is just a joke taken too far, because the same tricks that make analog horror effective are also great for making absurd, surreal comedy.
But what does this have to do with Archive 81, then? Well, if you ask me, Archive 81 is the first major example of big-budget analog horror. You could just as easily classify it as regular found footage horror, but the fact that it’s taking place in the 90’s, emphasizes antiquated technology and grimy visuals, and opens each episode with some sort of diegetic, in-universe advertisement or news segment about something showing up in the episode later, I feel confident that Archive 81 is definitely drawing from analog horror. Frankly, it’s mostly those openings that do it, but the show really, really puts an emphasis on those tapes. And that’s what makes it so analog to me, is that emphasis on technology.
Like I said, I have no idea if the original podcast for Archive 81 is older than modern analog horror, so I can’t say “who did it first,” and you could definitely argue that Archive 81’s style of analog filming stems not from other analog horrors, but instead from its auditory source material, but I think there’s a strong argument to be made that Archive 81 is what would happen if you took analog horror and gave it a Netflix budget. That being said, I don’t think it does analog horror particularly well.
The actual parts of the show that feel like “true” analog horror, like the eerie 90’s episode openings and the scenes in the past that are filmed directly from Melody’s camcorder, end up coming off more as a set dressing for the rest of the show instead of something meaningfully “analog.” For example, while there are definitely scenes that are on grungy tapes, these scenes never last longer than, say, thirty seconds or a minute. Whenever the show goes to the past with Meldoy’s camcorder, it jumps to standard high-definity cinematographic shots after just a few clips. Most of the show is not analog horror. 90% of the time, it’s just a regular TV show. And sure, this is probably for the same reason that plenty of people don’t like found footage stuff in general. It’s really hard to stomach several hours of what basically amounts to crappy video quality, scares and tension be damned. So, sure, I get it, it makes sense to make most of the show not crappy video quality, especially when you have a budget like whatever Netflix gave them. You have actual actors and actresses, you want to show the viewers what they look like. But I can’t help feeling like this is missing an opportunity.
Credit where credit is due, the vast majority of scenes in the past take place during Melody’s actual filming. It’s heavily implied that the scenes of the past we’re watching are also being watched by Dan, in the present day, as he restores the burned tapes. This sticks to the necessarily diegetic nature of analog horror. The scenes in the past have to be things that Dan would know and see, so that what he knows about Melody in the present makes sense. Dan knows exactly as much as we know. Except when, suddenly, we get to see more. Every so often, and especially later on in the show, we, the viewers, get to jump back into the past without Melody’s camcorder being present. It makes for both a narrative and thematic break that, from an analog perspective, is hard to swallow. Of course, it makes perfect sense in other lenses of analysis, since movies and TV shows jump perspectives and characters all the time. It’s not unlike the 1990’s version of It in that regard, following two stories set decades apart. But it’s not analog horror anymore. It’s just regular horror.
My biggest complaints about this almost entirely in the second half of the show, and I think they reflect my experience with the show overall, too. I’m not saying this all because I think the show is bad, or that it bored me, or anything. Almost the opposite; I really enjoyed it, and I think it does a lot of things really well. But it fails to keep the tension that analog horror builds, and almost entirely sidelines it by the end, when the story stops being about Dan restoring the tapes and more about Dan trying to uncover the secrets of a cult, ancient magic, a powerful businessman, a family fire, and some sort of alternate universe. Like, there’s an entire episode set in the 1920’s. That’s fine and all, but all sense of true analog is lost by then.
I found the second half, or really the last handful of episodes, to be far less compelling than the beginning. Perhaps this is because the show plays all its cards about three quarters of the way through. Really, by the 75% mark, the viewer knows everything that they had questions about from the beginning. Where in other shows or movies that’ll keep the audience guessing until the end (or just never give answers at all, as is common in many horror pieces), Archive 81 gives away all its secrets early, and then doesn’t do anything unexpected or interesting with them. I was talking to Nick about this, and in comparing Archive 81’s secrets to something like Gravity Falls’ secrets (more on that another time), Nick came up with the incredibly apt analogy that it’s like comparing opening a treasure chest to opening a door. Archive 81 is the chest; once you know everything, there’s nothing else to do. Gravity Falls is the door; discovering these secrets only make you want to dive further in, leading to new discoveries. I’ll, uh, probably use this analogy again in another post; it’s surprisingly applicable to other shows, too.
Perhaps this decline in intrigue overlapping with a decline in analog applications is just a coincidence. But if you ask me, I think they’re kind of tied together with the show not quite knowing what it wants to be. Is it found footage? Is it analog horror? Is it a thriller adapted from a podcast? Is it a time travel mystery? Is it a Supernatural-style paranormal mystery? I don’t know. It’s lots of things, and based on the twist at the end of season one, I’ll probably watch season two, whenever that happens. Again, the show did keep my attention til the end, even it was waning by that point (and it’s not just because of less analog stuff). But for a show that starts off as a something so clearly and deeply embedded in a particular style of horror, and for a show that uses that style of horror pretty dang well for the first few episodes, it’s disappointing to see it getting steamrolled by “Woah! There’s a ritual sacrifice now! Crazy, right?” at the end.
If the twist is anything to judge by, too, analog horror won’t really play much of a part of anything in the second season, though I’d be pleasantly surprised if they manage to work it in somehow (and I do have a few narrative ideas of how it would be possible). Maybe this is proof that analog horror, as a subgenre, can’t exist in the broader world as something increasibly marketable or fundable. Maybe this attests to the notion that analog horror has to be short and low-budget to be really special and truly “analog.” Or maybe it just didn’t get it right, and sooner or later someone will come around with another groundbreaking found footage analog horror movie, and the subgenre will get the multi-million dollar Blair Witch moment it (probably) deserves.
As an unrelated sidenote, I’m tentatively beginning my own foray into online horror films, specifically focusing on three films with an analog horror vibe. It’s more practice than anything, but I just finished up filming yesterday, so stay tuned for a more “official” announcement of that project. We’ll see how it goes, and hopefully it doesn’t turn out shitty. Now I just need someone to animate ten seconds of grainy videos.
