Archive 81 Captures the Essential Lovecraftian Nature of Found-Footage Horror

There has always been Lovecraftian elements to the found-footage horror subgenre. Many elements of H. P. Lovecraft’s most celebrated stories, such as “The Call of Cthulhu,” are presented in part as diaries or documents discovered by the story’s narrator. Thus, it’s only natural to extend the idea of found-writing to found-footage when working in the cinematic medium. Archive 81, the short-lived Netflix horror series based on a popular podcast, coalesces the Lovecraftian themes of found-footage horror in notable ways.

Developed by Rebecca Sonnenshine and based on a podcast by Daniel Powell and Marc Sollinger, Archive 81 follows two individuals in two different time periods. In the present day, Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie) is hired by the mysterious millionaire Virgil Davenport (Martin Donovan) to restore a series of videotape recordings that were damaged in a fire in 1994. As he restores the tapes, he watches them, and during these sequences, the show cuts to 1994, where we follow Melody Pendras (Dina Shihabi) as she investigates the creepy goings-on of her New York City apartment building, the Visser.

The narrative is nested and creates layers of voyeurism that ripple out through time and implicate the viewer in the act of watching. Much as Lovecraft’s writing is not entirely presented as epistolary, Archive 81 is not presented entirely as found-footage. For instance, the present day segments are conventionally cinematic and only sections of the 1994 segment are shown on screen as first-person recordings. Nevertheless, the show’s voyeuristic perspective is essential to the found-footage subgenre. 

As I argued in 2017, found-footage horror thrives off of linking the viewer to the victims (and occasionally killers) on screen. It does so through form—the presentation of the footage as real, mundane recordings—but also through the weaponization of the viewer’s attention. Found-footage horror is all about watching: the viewer watches characters watching through screens and the closer the viewer watches, the more the barrier between viewer and character breaks down.

Archive 81 thrives off of this use of the very process of watching. In the present day, we watch Dan as he watches Melody’s footage, which consists of her watching the other residents of the Visser through the lens of her video camera. Her investigation slowly uncovers a cult within the Visser around a demon known as Kaelego, which may still be operating in the present day to mess with Dan’s restoration. The material nature of the footage—that it’s physical tape and not digital recording—allows Kaelego’s influence to seep through time and affect Dan in the present. The nature of Kaelego and the show’s entire portrait of cultic worship brims with Lovecraftian details.

In a Lovecraftian story, evil is pervasive and all-consuming, but it is not conspicuous. The ancient evils of Cthulhu or Nyarlathotep or Azathoth are not visible to the everyday person, but only to those individuals who are capable of peering beyond the veil of reality. They are occult, from the Latin word occultus, which literally means “hidden.” In Lovecraft, evil finds a home in the arts and the academy, as the interests of the intellectual elite often dovetail with a pursuit of power (even of the supernatural kind).

Lovecraftian evil is also material. While there are powers at work in Lovecraft that seem spiritual, those powers are really an extension of beings that have a physical reality outside our time and space. The Ancient Ones or Elder Gods of Lovecraft often leave traces of their essence on objects in our world, whether books or runes or sacred objects or homes, such as the infamous witch house of “The Dreams in the Witch House”; their incomprehensible, almost spiritual, power is transferred to material reality. Most obviously, Lovecraftian evil causes insanity. A person who glimpses the true, unforgiving nature of the cosmos cannot do so and remain sane. Archive 81 incorporates all these essential Lovecraftian elements in its blend of found-footage horror and slow-burn drama.

The Artistic & Academic Facade of the Occult

In Archive 81, the cult of Kaelego operates within the Visser, but its principal agents have covers as artists and academics. In the stories of Lovecraft, the arts and the academy are implicated in the occult because academics and artists are interested in the past and discovering hidden knowledge. Both artists and academics seek to uncover truths about the world, whether emotional, scientific, or philosophical in nature, and this can lead them to cross the thresholds of forbidden knowledge that others will not.

As well, the arts and academics often have economically-privileged situations in society, which allow individuals the time and resources able to discover occult knowledge; it’s an investigative avenue only available to those who aren’t overwhelmed by economic precariousness or have their days filled to the brim with menial tasks. It’s also relatively inconspicuous; academics and artists are expected to research strange old texts or investigate odd artistic avenues. The excesses of the rich and educated even provide cover for occult activities, such as in Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep,” where the deranged behaviour of Edward and Asenath Derby is dismissed as simple libertine frivolities and eccentricities.

In Archive 81, art and academics provide a similar cover for cultists. Cassandra Wall (Kristin Griffith) is a rich, eldery dilettante with a vast art collection. Tamara Stefano (Kate Eastman) is an aspiring opera composer. Samuel Spare (Evan Jonigkeit) is a professor. All three individuals are central to the cult, especially Samuel, who is its leader, but they use their artistic and academic covers to deflect attention from their real pursuits. Melody—and by extension Dan (and the viewer)—discovers key elements of the Kaelego cult throughout the building, but Cassandra, Tamara, and Samuel use their covers to explain these elements away. In episode two, Melody sneaks into the basement rec room and discovers the residents chanting and humming a strange tune in front of a statue of Kaelego. However, Samuel has been careful to bring Melody to a recital for Tamara’s new opera earlier that night; the chanting is merely rehearsal, he assures her, deflecting from their true purpose.

Later, Melody and her friend Annabelle (Julia Chan) discover a strange black mold growing through the radiators and in the basement of the building. We later learn that the mold is a side effect of Kaelego phasing between dimensions, as if his physical presence plants a spore in our reality that pollinates, similar to the extraterrestrial mold of “The Colour Out of Space.” But Cassandra merely explains this away as old and extremely rare paint used by her late sister to craft her artistic masterworks. When Melody discovers books charting the history of Kaelego, Samuel confiscates them and claims they are research documents. At every step of her investigation, Melody is blocked by the pretense of artistic or academic inquiry.

This decoy nature of art is also present during some of the show’s teasers at the beginning of episodes, which show archival footage relating to Melody and Dan’s investigation. At one point we watch footage of an old horror movie called The Circle, which depicts a cult similar to Kaelego’s, but does so in heightened, old B-movie fashion. We learn that The Circle is actually based on a rare snuff film, whose creation we witness in the flashback episode, “The Ferryman,” but the existence of the Hollywood version is key to once again deflect attention and make any occult interests seem frivolous trappings to harmless entertainment. Even a seance in episode four, “Spirit Receivers,” is treated similarly, laughed off as a kooky diversion for the elites in the Visser, despite the seance culminating in the medium Beatriz (Sol Miranda) clawing her eyes out. Throughout Archive 81, as in much of Lovecraft’s work, cults hide in plain sight.

The Material Nature of Evil

Material objects have an almost supernatural power in Archive 81, as in much of Lovecraft’s work. Part of Archive 81’s dedication to physical media is rooted in Netflix’s nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s. The visuals of Dan dissembling, cleaning, and reassembling old tapes is not only essential to the plot, but also offers a nostalgic reminder to its target audience of Gen Xers and Millennials of their childhood videotapes, cassettes, and tape recorders. This approach has even come to target Zoomers, who never lived through the 1980s and 1990s, but who have been consumed by imagined nostalgia for the time period ever since Stranger Things became a massive hit in 2016. Dan’s apartment is full of film memorabilia and old recording devices, which only adds to the referential and nostalgic nature of the production design. He even wears a t-shirt with the poster for Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear on it, in a key reference to a cult touchstone (and inspiration for the show’s own seance scene). Embracing physical media plays into Netflix’s nostalgic approach to content.

But it also leans into the Lovecraftian nature of evil. While famous for supernatural stories of the unknown, Lovecraft was an arch-materialist. He thought there was no God, no afterlife, no world beyond our own. He was horribly depressed and hated much of the world (for some brilliant criticism of Lovecraft that blends biographical and philosophical readings, check out Michel Houellebecq’s H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life). So to capture this misanthropic view of reality, Lovecraft wrote stories with evil beings that manifested his feelings about the world. But as a materialist, Lovecraft was not interested in sticking to metaphor or analogy in his stories. No, his evil was real and had form and material being, even if that material being was incomprehensible to his protagonists. And those beings leave their imprint on the objects they come into contact with: the Cthulhu statue in “The Call of Cthulhu,” the house in “Dreams of the Witch House,” the meteorite in “The Colour Out of Space.” The Ancient Ones confound and expand our understanding of physical reality to the point that we term their influence supernatural.

In Archive 81, Kaelego operates similarly. He exists in a different dimension of reality than our own, but he is not a demon in a conventional Judeo-Christian manner. His apparently supernatural influence is simply the expression of his otherworldly influence on our physical reality. Thus, his physical presence warps objects he comes into contact with. Melody’s tapes have residual traces of Kaelego’s dimension on them; Dan can even glimpse the shape of Kaelego when he lets the static run on his screen. The mold that grows from the radiators in the Visser is similar to the tapes, but more explicit. Cassandra uses it as paint, but it’s a physical outgrowth of Kaelego’s dimension. The ability of physical media to interact with what we term supernatural becomes more explicit in the flashbacks of episode 7, where cultists in the 1920s express fascination with spirit photography: the idea that photographs can capture ghosts. This fascination with the abilities of photography and the cinema to tap into other dimensions has been around since the days of Lovecraft, but it takes a digital work like Archive 81 to truly illuminate this fact for modern audiences.

In found-footage, the footage itself is implicitly evil, since it’s the medium through which we witness the suffering of the characters on screen. Horror movies often interrogate the moral nature of their own content—it’s a pet theme of Wes Craven’s work, for instance, especially in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and Scream, and Scott Derrickson’s Sinister similarly explores the demonic nature of horror footage. But found-footage takes this approach further and presents itself as a literal record of evil. This approach has even carried over into folklore about found-footage movies, such as The Blair Witch Project, which was famously advertised as real footage. Steven Spielberg even famously thought the DVD of Paranormal Activity was haunted when he returned it to Jason Blum in a black garbage bag; he wouldn’t touch it lest some kind of demonic presence spill over, as if the DVD itself could contain the essence of the demon in the film.

Archive 81 makes the implicit evil nature of the footage in found-footage explicit. The footage that Dan restores not only uncovers the cult of Kaelego, it contains traces of Kaelego himself. Dan has the same relationship towards Melody’s footage as we do towards the show itself. The waves of implication ripple outwards, pulling the viewer into the tide.

The Insanity of Truth

In all Lovecraftian stories, an encounter with the Ancient Ones leads to death or insanity. A human cannot look upon the Mythos and remain the same. From an external point of view, such madness seems like a psychotic episode. And in a way it is, but the psychosis is triggered by external forces, not internal ones. Thus, madness becomes another tool of cultists to use against anyone that seeks to stop them.

Archive 81 has an interesting twist on Lovecraftian madness, as it has characters descend into madness the closer they get to Kaelego, while also having the cultists weaponize modern notions of madness to manipulate characters. Regarding the first, the mold which grows from Kaelego leads to mental deterioration. The cultists secretly feed it to one of the Visser’s child residents, Jess (Ariana Neal), through her tea in order to make her defenseless and provoke seizures, which her mother thinks are demonic possessions. Samuel convinces Jess’s mother and the others that it’s entirely a physiological phenomenon, but the seizures are in fact a result of Kaelego’s demonic presence in the mold she’s ingested. Similarly, Annabelle starts painting with the mold Cassandra gives her and she’s driven insane and institutionalized, thinking that she’s seeing visions and witnessing people trapped within the paint. Both of these cases mirror the insanity present in Lovecraft’s stories.

But the show also has the cultists aware of the psychic effects of proximity to Kaelego and able to exploit them. Through exposition, we learn that Melody and Dan both suffer from mental illnesses prior to their investigation into the Kaelego cult. Dan suffered a psychotic episode where he was hospitalized, while Melody grew up in group homes and has required intensive therapy throughout her life. They are both mentally vulnerable, and therefore unreliable witnesses, which makes them ideal prey for the cultists. Once they start to pick up on the clues, they are waylaid again and again by the villains who use our modern understanding of mental illness to manipulate them. Samuel gaslights Melody throughout her investigation. Every time she uncovers something, he makes it so that she seems insane. This culminates with her being committed to a psychiatric hospital. 

Meanwhile, as Dan glimpses Kaelego on the tapes and starts to discover strange files and records in Virgil Davenport’s country compound, Virgil continuously asks Dan whether he’s experiencing a recurrence of his psychotic episode. Is he seeing visions again? Is he imagining things? Is he sure he can continue doing the work? Ironically, the work is what is causing his mental deterioration. Insanity is a result of proximity to Kaelego, but it’s also a tool for his cultlists to use against those who would stop his plans from being carried out.

Archive 81 is not only a tale of Lovecraftian horror just as it is not only a found-footage horror series. But it uses essential aspects of Lovecraftian storytelling to paint a portrait of madness and manipulation across the 20th and 21st centuries. It transitions Lovecraftian horror not only from the page to the screen, but from physical media to digital media. In doing so, it reminds us of the power of Lovecraft’s horror and the ways that Lovecraft continues to influence horror storytelling two decades into the 21st century.

Archive 81 (Netflix)

Developed by Rebecca Sonnenshine, based on the podcast by Daniel Powell and Marc Sollinger; starring Mamoudou Athie, Dina Shihabi, Evan Jonigkeit, Julia Chen, Ariana Neal, Matt McGorry, Martin Donovan.

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