HALLOWEEN HORROR: Archive 81 (2022)

A shy video-restoration expert, Dan Turner (Underwater's Mamoudou Athie) is offered a once-in-a-lifetime financial deal to work on a sensitive project for shady businessman Virgil Davenport (Martin Donovan).

The job involves relocating to an isolated compound, where Dan will be restoring and digitising a fragile collection of fire-damaged video tapes.

He soon learns that these tapes, dating from the mid-90s, were part of a doctoral thesis by student Melody Pendras (Altered Carbon's Dina Shihabi) who was compiling an oral history of the eccentric residents of a New York apartment building.

However, as he watches the tapes, not only does Dan discover a personal connection to the unfolding story but he also sees that Melody seemingly stumbled upon a cult operating in the building.

Told over eight, hour-long episodes, Archive 81 is the latest horror offering from Netflix and I have to say upfront it's as creepy as anything.

Based on a podcast (that I was previously unaware of), for my tastes, this is as close to perfection as anything I've seen in a very long time.

I was also quite surprised - going in spoiler-free - how many coincidences there were between elements of Archive 81 and The Last Ritual, an Arkham Horror story by S.A. Sidor, which I read at the end of 2021.

Both involve cults operating in artistic communities, and, as we go deeper down the rabbit hole the backstory of Archive 81 pays a visit to a very Lovecraftian 1920s. 

The whole cult throughline has incredible Lovecraftian overtones, which made me immensely happy as the series felt like a clever modernisation of the writings of this hugely important and influential horror story scribe.

With its inclusion of another of my favourite tropes - the hunt for mysterious or cursed films - I was also reminded of the comic book mini-series, The Lot (from defunct publisher Bad Idea) and, of course, John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns, and Deadwax.

Initially I'd only planned to watch the first episode (I'd offered to check the show for 'gore content' on behalf of an old friend) of Archive 81, but I was hooked from the get-go.

I binged the whole eight-hour show in a day - with some breaks for 'real life', naturally.

Focusing primarily on Dan's investigation, and then Melody's as a story-within-the-story, some might dismiss Archive 81 as a slow-burner, but it's simply being methodical, with the viewer's close attention being rewarded with subtle clues and foreshadowing.

Some clues are there up front, like the references to Dante's Inferno, with the inclusion of an old film serial called The Circle, and our protagonist, Dan T, being led on this descent into Hell by a gentleman called Virgil.

And I'm sure there were plenty of other references and allusions that I failed to pick up on. 

By the end you will come to realise that everything was important. Other properties may boast that "it's all connected" in their rambling franchises, but in Archive 81 it really is.

If I had a small nit to pick it would be the special effects of a certain creature manifestation, but this is a very small quibble and certainly doesn't detract from the incredible, unnerving nature of the show.

Broadcast Signal Intrusion (2021)

Chicago, 1999. Video archivist James (Glee's Harry Shum Jr), haunted by the disappearance of his wife Hanna, stumbles across a surreal, nightmarish, clip of a "broadcast signal intrusion" - a mysterious pirate hack of a televised signal.

Fascinated, he starts to dig deeper, learning that these signal hacks are extremely rare and the authorities have managed to track down those responsible for all except for the one that initially triggered James's interest. 

He discovers that not only was this one of a pair of known intrusions, but there was possibly a third as well.

Mixed up with all this is the fact that a woman supposedly disappeared, probably kidnapped and maybe murdered, the night before each intrusion - and the last one was the night after his wife disappeared.

Instead of reporting her to the police, James teams up with Alice (Kelley Mack), a strange woman who follows him one night, for nebulous reasons.

Together they disappear down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, crossing paths with a selection of enigmatic and oddball characters, as James becomes increasingly paranoid on his dual quest to find out who created the "broadcast signal intrusion" and what happened to his wife.

Starting from a similar space as the far-superior Archive 81, Broadcast Signal Intrusion instead apes True Detective (poorly) using this elaborate, potential Creepypasta urban legend to obfuscate a very linear murder mystery.

I'll confess I was hoping for another Archive 81, Deadwax, or Cigarette Burns.

Being inspired by true events (there were actual signal intrusions of a similar nature in the mid-to-late '80s), I had high hopes as to what fantastical journey the movie would take its conspiracy theory-driven protagonist on.

However, of all the potential stories that could have sprung from this set-up, a poor man's Batman adventure - where the villain leaves a trail of breadcrumbs that only the protagonist can follow (despite years of investigations by various branches of the government and law enforcement) - was a major let-down.
 
There are films where you can recognise their greatness early on, but there are others - usually mystery stories - where everything hangs on the final reveal, which can make or break the audience's investment in the piece.

Sadly, as  became increasingly clear as the 104-minute movie dragged on, the climactic revelation of Broadcast Signal Intrusion, despite being dressed up in the trappings of James's dramatic dive into insanity, raised little more than a shrug and a underwhelmed "oh, was that it?" reaction.

For all the smoke-and-mirrors, James' unearthing of this great secret is mindbogglingly straight-forward, with the only real mysteries being the unexplained comings and goings of the small coterie of supporting characters.

Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall's script, directed by Jacob Gentry, was riddled with convenient coincidences,  inconstancies, and plot holes that you were probably expected to hand wave away with a "that's the nature of the beast" get-out-of-jail-free card.

But filmmakers have to earn that sort of trust from their audience and Broadcast Signal Intrusion falls well short.