Why do horror stories love archives?
The days are growing short, there’s a chill in the air, and Halloween is upon us. Whether you are the type to watch a horror movie in the dark from behind your hands or curl up with a scary book, it is the perfect time of year for a spooky story. I’m a scary book guy myself, and once you have enough scary stories under your belt you begin to notice a few patterns; basements are bad news, phones never have any signal, and horror stories love an archive.
Characters will pour over microfilm of old newspapers, trying to understand what is happening to them and why or will run panicked through the narrow spaces between shelves, turning blind corners with nothing but the hope that they will find safety. Sometimes they are themselves archivists, believing themselves to be separate and safe from the horrors they are studying, at least at the beginning.
But why is the genre so fond of archives? There are a few reasons. Most basic is its utility for exposition. When one of the protagonists of Jac Jemc’s The Grip Of It ventures to the local library to trawl through their microfilm records (“Microfilm mention!” I excitedly post to my group chat, with a photo of the page), Jemc now has a way to tell us all the history she wants of the novel’s spooky house and on top of that, with the help of difficult to find library staff and a character who can’t change the film by himself, a very good reason why we can’t have that information all at once.
There is archive, also, as setting. These are places the average person doesn’t often see, they are unfamiliar and often a little claustrophobic, with tall shelves, narrow walkways and blind corners. Often, such as in It: Chapter One we are following characters that are not meant to be there, adding the tension of getting caught not just by whatever horrifying form Pennywise is using to torment the Losers Club this time, but by a librarian who would not take kindly to a kid running around her building. On top of the physical setting of the archive itself, the aesthetics of the materials is also hugely interesting. There is a huge love at the moment for analogue horror (good news for me, it’s one of my favourite things), and the high contrast black and white of microfilm, typewritten letters, the distinctive look of documents printed with dot matrix printers, as well as older methods of media storage such as cassettes and VHS tapes all fit into that effortlessly.
Then of course we have archive as premise. In The Magnus Archives an anthology podcast with an overarching metaplot, inexperienced archivist Jonathan pulls spooky stories to tell from the mess of statements made by his predecessor. The concept of an archive here is also used beyond a justification for the anthology format and as a vital component of the overarching plot, which deals among other things (many other things, this is a show with so many different kinds of spooky there are so many quizzes to figure out which you are – I got the buried!) with ideas around watching and gathering stories.
The Magnus Archives are far from the only people doing this. Archives, collections and libraries are an excellent basis for anthologies, in how they can pull together many different stories that cant be as connected, in theme or subject, or not as the creators want. The SCP Foundation is an online, collaborative fiction collection, consisting of the records of it’s titular foundation as it attempts to monitor, study and control all manner of supernatural anomalies. The tone ranges from comedic (SCP-3671, a supernatural cereal box) to horrifying (personally I remember being terrified by SCP-001 The Literal Sun as a teenager). If we take the meaning of “archive” a little more loosely, then we get films like V/H/S 1 & 2, these anthology films using a framing narrative of characters discovering a corpse next to a vast collection of tapes they were seemingly collecting. This anthology choses to connect its stories through the nostalgic style of a VHS tape, making it an excellent example of the analogue horror I mentioned earlier.
Of course a story set in an archive doesn’t have to be an anthology. In Archive 81 (a podcast turned TV series) a conservator is hired to restore audio tapes (VHSs in the TV show) and is pulled into the mystery they reveal, with the archival premise being a way for the protagonist (and us, through him) to become involved in the story.
Sometimes the story itself is the record, Dracula presents itself as the collected documents of the events it contains, telling its story through letters, news articles and diary entries. House of Leaves is a bizarre book that uses the layers of documents and comments on those documents to tell its story of a house that shouldn’t exist. “If anybody finds this, you need to know what happened,” say protagonists from the found footage craze of the 2000s, kicked off by The Blair Witch Project in 1998 and ranging all the way from blockbuster films like Paranormal Activity, or Cloverfield to small indie projects like the Marble Hornets series. These characters are all driven by a desire to record the world around them, and to pass that on to others. Similar to the stories from the anthology series like the ones I mentioned they are all use diegetic methods of storytelling (that is, there are in universe reasons why the words and images we see are being recorded) which makes them seem all the more real, and often in horror a story feeling more real makes it feel more scary.
Why do horror stories love archives? Because they’re useful, because they’re spooky, and because we, as people, love to archive.
Happy Halloween!
