Halloween Horror: The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)

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When it first came out in 2007, John Erick Dowdle’s The Poughkeepsie Tapes was something of an infamous, hidden work. It was hardly released and generally inaccessible for almost a decade, which made the film accrue a reputation as one of the most disturbing films of recent years. The found footage horror film imagines a documentary about the recordings of a serial killer operating in New York and Pennsylvania. At the time, this approach was viewed as a hideous novelty. When viewed in 2025, it almost seems rote. Seemingly every second documentary on Netflix is about horrifying serial killers, delighting in every grisly detail of their famous crimes. So when the real thing has become ever more present and disturbing than the fiction, what are we to make of the fiction?

Well, this particular fictional work is an oddity, that’s for sure. Obviously low budget and cleverly envisioned, if not always cleverly executed, The Poughkeepsie Tapes alternates between attempts at cable documentary storytelling and grainy, violent footage of the serial killer’s crimes. The cable documentary stuff is roughly acted and filmed but not altogether inaccurate in its attempts to approximate the sensationalist commentary and teary-eyed memorializing that you find in such works. The crooked camerawork, flat lighting, and odd line readings remind you of something you’d find playing on Showcase at 11pm on a random week night.

However, the film ultimately lives and dies on the serial killer footage itself. These sequences are shot in grainy camcorder with interlacing artifacts warping the screen, obscuring the horrible things happening, whether the kidnapping of a child or the brutal murder of a woman in a basement. The grainy cinematography also has the added benefit of masking the low budget. Not that the low quality does much to mask how gross and uncomfortable everything is that you’re watching on screen. A few sequences are genuinely chilling, such as an abduction scene early on where the killer stalks a woman he eventually forces to become his unwilling slave. But others are just silly, such as when the killer starts donning medieval plague doctor masks. Eventually, the killer starts berating his victims in bizarrely long sequences and the tension almost entirely dissipates.

You’d assume all these moments are meant to expose the monstrosity of humanity. But do we really need the reminder? In 2025, stories about evil serial killers are a dime a dozen. It is a weak excuse to say that such works fixate on disgusting, evil details in order to expose the rot of humanity or speak up for victims. The prurience of the material is the raison d’être. So with The Poughkeepsie Tapes, what are we left with when we push through the initial discomfort with being exposed to this sort of material in such detail? The film exists in that uneasy space between exposé and endurance test, meta commentary and genre exercise. It cannot resolve the contradictions in its approach.

The most discomfiting part of The Poughkeepsie Tapes is that you feel the filmmakers get lost in the vileness of the material. When the footage is interspersed with the documentary elements, it doesn’t overwhelm us, but the deeper into the film we get, we get longer and longer stretches of the killer’s footage, which grows punishing, but not in the way we want. The longer we spend with the killer, the more it stretches the credulity of the material. It also grows almost sadistic in its presentation, seemingly delighting in how gross it can make the footage and how uncomfortable it can make the viewer.

In a world where Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms (2023) exists, The Poughkeepsie Tapes seems redundant. At the time, perhaps its low-budget provocations had more of an edge, but today, whatever insights its rough edges offer are wiped out by its overwhelmingly salacious lens. Like the cable documentaries it mocks, it’s too enamoured of its subject matter, lost in the maelstrom of the evil it seeks to expose.

5 out of 10

The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007, USA)

Directed by John Erick Dowdle; written by John Erick Dowdle based on a story by John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle; starring Stacy Chobsky, Ben Messmer, Ivan Brogger, Lou George, Michael Lawson.

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