Rebecca Sonnenshine Reveals The Origins Of Archive 81 And Other Horror Influences
By Isabella Wilson
How did you come on board "Archive 81?" Were you familiar with the podcast or was this entirely new to you?
I was brought on by Netflix and Atomic Monster to develop this podcast. I had not listened to it beforehand. I'm more of a news podcast person. I haven't listened to a lot of fiction podcasts, so it was new to me, but the premise of it — found footage, supernatural — those are all things that are very much in my wheelhouse. I [came] to writing from filmmaking. I went to film school. I have my own archive of tapes. I used to carry a camera around everywhere I went, so I felt like this was very much a project that I felt very close to the characters, in a way. I was able to ... come on board and I picked out all my ideas, and then we went forward from there. It's definitely everything I love about a good genre story.
You had done sort of these experimental films in film school, including one where you had a woman dreaming about eating her own head. Have you got to play with what you were doing in college and this project?
Yeah, very much so. I was a very geeky film student at UCLA. I made some experimental films. I was very interested in camera effects ... rolling the film backs and then double exposing. Stuff like that, it's super geeky stuff, which is something I did. We're living in a digital world now, but in the series, [we] definitely got a chance to play with a lot of formats that I used to use. I used to shoot stuff on eight millimeter film, 16 millimeter film, high video, which is what Melody uses in the show.
I did all sorts of weird things with that effect that took me to other formats, and we really got to use that stuff in the show. We really did shoot on high millimeter video ... we had a camera, we shot on it, we put it in the show. Some of it is post production, but a lot of it is not. It's actually that format, so it's super exciting to be honest. [We got to use] some other formats too, like the PXL 2000. It was all super exciting. It made me feel like a film student again.
