Archive81

I don’t often review books and even less rarely films or series. I’m not sure why, really—perhaps it’s that most things that can be said about a work are already and quickly said, and it does little to add to that din. Maybe, also, because I rarely read reviews unless I have absolutely no intention of reading or watching a thing.

Regardless, I’ve a recommendation for you: the recently released series on Netflix, Archive81. I won’t tell you about it, except to note something irksome and staid that other occult fantasies have which this one completely lacks.

If you watched and found disappointing The Witch, or Midsommer, or Hereditary, but didn’t quite know why, perhaps you noted the same problem I did. Despite their attempts at being edgy and fresh, they’re all in the end Judeo-Christian fantasies about the occult. Each of them could just as easily have been written by a televangelist as an edgy woke hipster, both of whose imaginations about the chthonic other are mostly just tepid shadow projections, dreaming the occult as the mere opposite of the order they either uphold or despise.

Archive81 avoids all that better than anything else I’ve seen in decades, and more so presents the other as a truly alien and thus a terrifying presence. “Incursion” is a good word for this, which is what Lovecraft was particularly good at, but also the sort of things both druids and monks spent long nights fearing.