The Devil’s Videotapes | The Press

There are more and more series that handle the supernatural and horror and that’s good. It’s great, shows about police officers, lawyers or doctors, but popular titles like Yellowjackets Where Squid Game show the voracious appetite of couch potatoes for genre productions, smeared with fright and terror.

You won’t be screaming in fear every five seconds in Archives 81, Netflix’s new horror series with satanic accents, whose popularity is swelling thanks to favorable word of mouth. The eight one-hour episodes, offered in English and French, rather trigger a sneaky paranoia, which seeps slowly but surely into our cocoons. After the fourth hour, I was ready to hold a Ouija board while speaking Latin, eyes rolling back, foam at the corner of my mouth. I was bewitched at this point.

The more the episodes progress, the more the division between the past and the present blurs. The nightmare encroaches on reality. And fear screws into our minds against a musical backdrop Amityville.

Archives 81 follows the young archivist Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie), a specialist in the restoration of magnetic tapes, who accepts a contract as lucrative as it is mysterious. A billionaire (Martin Donovan) entrusts him with a box of video cassettes which were rescued from the fire of a mythical building in Manhattan. These damaged tapes were shot in the spring of 1994 by a young documentary filmmaker, Melody Pendras (Dina Shihabi), who was preparing a thesis on the inhabitants of this building, each one stranger than the next.

The billionaire sets up Dan in a bunker in the countryside to clean analog equipment without distraction, without WiFi and without cellular network. Isolated and psychologically fragile, Dan pushes the first videocassette into the VCR and plunges into the gloomy universe of the residents of the building, under the influence of a demonic entity. Mephistophelian rites, seances of spiritualism and satanic symbols, terrible things happen in these apartments, especially on the sixth floor, the cursed floor. Without divulging anything, Dan will discover a direct link between his own life and those of the specters of 1994 parading on his monitor.

Archives 81 contains notes from The Blair Witch Project (the unstable video camera), The Ring (stare carefully at the images on the TV) and The Shining (for the residence with long corridors). Horror fans will also detect touches of Rosemary’s Baby.

Back to the plot, the billionaire who hired Dan to recover the famous video archives hides his game well. What is he looking for, exactly? Why does he know Dan’s detailed medical history? What is he hiding in the labyrinth house where he has installed our good Dan?

And beyond the paranormal, it’s also a TV series about childhood trauma and mental illness. Warning, however. Archives 81 unfolds at a slower pace than a series like American Horror Story. It’s hypnotic as a proposal. And like the protagonist obsessed with the ghosts of the past, we sink into a state of acute distrust. It’s looking at the lights off, with a bunch of lit candles, one of which is placed in the center of a circle, of course.

Memories lost and found

The plot ofAnother story de Radio-Canada took a leap of a year, Monday evening, which gave a good impetus to the soap opera of Chantal Cadieux, which will go out for good in the spring.

This leap in time has allowed viewers to see that Sébastien’s Alzheimer’s (Benoît McGinnis) has progressed dazzlingly, while the condition of Manon/Anémone (Marina Orsini) has deteriorated, never as much as that of his son.

The scenes of confusion and absence played by Benoît McGinnis and Marina Orsini were striking. These moments could have turned into caricatures and sketches. They were full of truth, especially when Sébastien did not recognize his brother Jean-Olivier (Adam Kosh) and when Anémone started a striptease in front of his family. We felt perfectly the distress of the characters.

In Belleville, Maryse (Marie-Laurence Moreau) and Émilien (Patrice Godin) form a very beautiful couple. An unlikely couple, but well matched. Let’s not forget that Émilien, a former lover of Anemone, gave birth to his daughter Karla (Marilou Morin), who is now dating Vincent (Sébastien Ricard), Maryse’s ex-boyfriend.

Former flame of Jean-Olivier, the unstable Bianka (Élizabeth Duperré) officially sees his half-brother Simon (Mikhaïl Ahooja). Well follow here. Bianka is the daughter of Patricia (Marie Turgeon), who has long been married to Ron (Vincent Graton), who has returned to live with Manon/Anemone, Simon’s mother.

I love screenwriter Chantal Cadieux for that: she has fun with the codes of soap and assume it.

Ah yes, RIP to the character of the villainous Valaire (Steve Banner), Caroline’s biological father – he raped Manon/Anemone at the time, remember. This same Caroline (Debbie Lynch-White) finally discovered that the father of her murdered half-sister Mona (Marie-Évelyne Baribeau) was not the villainous Valaire but…Ron! Everything stays in the family with the Blanchette-Leduc-Romero-Petterson family.