ARCHIVE 81 SERIES REVIEW

How many pics and vids do we all have on our phones? How many of those were actually worth shooting? Have you ever considered what it means to capture a moment in time like that? To give it an eternity it was never meant to have? What else might we be scooping up in that moment? What can’t we see? History? Ghosts? Worse? Archive 81 asks us that very thing. This 8-part miniseries is loosely based on the popular found footage podcast of the same name. It follows Dan Turner, an archivist who takes a job restoring a collection of damaged videotapes from 1994. Reconstructing the work of a documentary filmmaker named Melody Pendras, he is drawn into her investigation of a dangerous cult at an old apartment building. As the season unfolds across these two timelines, Dan slowly finds himself obsessed with uncovering what happened to Melody. Lewayne, Robert, and T.C. reminisce about their love of the 90s and whether or not they find Archive 81 as scary as oversized JNCO jeans or scarier than all the found footage movies that were spawned by the Blair Witch Project.

WATCH HERE

CREATED BY: Rebecca Sonnenshine, Paul Harris Boardman, and James Wan

STARRING: Mamoudou Athie, Dina Shihabi, Evan Jonigkeit, Julia Chan, Ariana Neal, Matt McGorry, Martin Donovan, Charlie Hudson III, Kate Eastman, Eden Marryshow

 

YOUR REVIEWERS

 

T.C. De Witt (Screener Squad)

T.C. De Witt is a multi-awarded writer/director originally from Wisconsin and now based in Los Angeles. His life has been devoted to the arts since he was a child. He’s been a stage performer, playwright, stand-up comic, film and television actor, radio DJ, podcaster published author, recorded musician, and comic writer/illustrator. He is now a professional screenwriter and has been thriving for the past decade, regularly offering his talents to production studios in LA, Chicago, Milwaukee, and internationally in Sydney and Poland. He’s provided content for Amazon Prime, Netflix, and several YouTube partners. His films have screened internationally, and his stageplays have been performed across the country. In the last ten years, he has directed 57 films, 23 episodes of his series The One Minute Rewatch, 300+ episodes of podcasts, and his multi-award-winning short film Screen: Righter screened at the Festival de Cannes in 2016. He has released two feature films, The Princess Knight and A Christmas Sunset. He thrives on collaboration and the thrill of sharing stories in all forms.

 

 

Lewayne White (Screener Squad)

Lewayne’s earliest memories are of watching movies and reading comics, which instilled in him a sense of wonder, a vivid imagination, and unrealistic expectations. It also means he spends a lot of time watching movies, writing scripts for them, and trying to get them made. He lives in the middle of middle America after landing there as a child, and has remained there mainly because he hates packing.

 

 

 

Robert Garza (Screener Squad)

If it weren’t for sad music and scary stories I wouldn’t be as well-adjusted and cheerful as I am today. Moonlighting as a musician off and on since adolescence, I am as big a fan of scores and needle drops as I am of slow zooms, production design, and third act exposition. Just about all of my screen time is spent on international horror, drama, and hour long episodic. Big fan of genre, and the biggest fan of supernatural horror and dark sci-fi with meaningful representation and narratives that use trauma, grief, and grace as more than surface-level content. Also, I read a ton of modern horror novels/comics and stan Matt Berry. In the before times I worked music and film festivals across the US and will hopefully return to that sometime in the future.