“Stranger Things” is the leading science fiction show on Netflix, often the first that comes to mind when considering the streamer’s offerings in the genre. However, there are plenty of hidden gems if you’d rather stay out of the Upside Down, including the sci-fi horror “Archive 81.” Released in 2022 and based on a podcast by Daniel Powell and Marc Sollinger, the series takes place in two timelines, 1994 and the present, surrounding a set of Hi8 tapes, a kind of video cassette.
Dan (Mamoudou Athie) is an archivist, given the tapes to work on. The videos on them feature a woman named Melody (Dina Shihabi) chronicling her dissertation. She’s researching the Visser, an apartment building with eclectic residents. As both get deeper into their respective projects, with Dan restoring more tapes and Melody interviewing more residents, it becomes clear there is something more sinister lingering in the Visser.
With only eight episodes, “Archive 81” is the ideal weekend binge. The episodes range from 45 to 58 minutes long, making it easy to either split the single season in half or watch it all in one day. The series boasts strong critic and audience scores, with 87% and 75%, respectively, on Rotten Tomatoes. Reviews compliment the mystery of the show, with critic Brian Tallerico of Roger Ebert favorably comparing it to “The Shining” and “Rosemary’s Baby.”
Archive 81 is a multi-season podcast
The podcast of the same name that “Archive 81” is based on began in 2016, posting three seasons and two miniseries before it came to a close in 2019. The podcast follows Mark (Marc Sollinger) as he looks into his friend Dan’s (Daniel Powell) disappearance. Like the Netflix series, Dan is an archivist working on a set of tapes following Melody’s (Amelia Kidd) academic work with the Visser.
The podcast takes the form of an audio found footage piece, with listeners hearing the recordings as Dan restores each tape. After Dan’s disappearance, it’s Mark sharing them. In an interview with TVOvermind in 2016, Powell shares that his “appreciation for [the] found footage style of horror storytelling” and work with “a sound effects library” were significant inspirations for “Archive 81.” For Sollinger, he looked to the cosmic horror genre as inspiration while writing the first season.
The duo wrote every episode of Season 1 before the voice actors began recording them. However, Powell was thinking about the sound early on. “I usually start gathering assets and sketching out conceptual audio ideas as soon as we start reviewing the first drafts of scripts,” he shared. This allowed him to think about the soundscape as they were working on the story and made the editing process easier. While you can’t quite binge the podcast in a weekend, you can binge the Netflix series in that time, and then listen to the podcast to hear more of the story.
