Review: An archivist gets drawn into a spooky cold case in addictive Archive 81

Enlarge / Dina Shihabi co-stars as Melody Pendras, a documentary filmmaker whose fire-damaged 1994 tapes end up in the hands of archivist Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie) in the Netflix series Archive 81. It's loosely based on a podcast of the same name. (credit: Netflix)

A troubled archivist finds himself drawn into the mystery of a woman who disappeared two decades ago in Archive 81, a new horror series from Netflix. Technically, the show belongs to the found footage subgenre of horror, but tonally, this spookily addictive eight-episode series evokes classic supernatural horror fare like Rosemary's Baby-exactly what one should expect when James Wan (of the Insidious and Conjuring franchises) is among the producers.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

The series is loosely based on the popular found footage podcast of the same name created by Daniel Powell and Marc Sollinger, in which the creators play fictionalized versions of themselves. The podcast tells the story of Daniel Powell, an archivist who goes missing after taking a job with the Housing Historical Committee of New York State. After Daniel's disappearance, his best friend Mark Sollinger finds hundreds of hours of audio tapes that Daniel had been archiving; the audio features interviews with residents in a high-rise building in 1994. Mark releases the tapes in the form of a podcast. The podcast is now in its third season.

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