John Erick Dowdle’s The Poughkeepsie Tapes premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2007 and was originally set for a wider release through MGM until they got cold feet and cancelled the release. For many years it languished in semi-limbo, seen only in the briefest of video on demand releases and on a short run on US the cable channel DirecTV (it ran for as little as a week according to some sources). Perhaps due to its subject matter, a particularly brutal and sadistic serial killer whose crimes are documented hundreds of videotapes, the film started to accrue a fearsome reputation for being particularly nasty and gratuitous. When it was finally released to a wider audience in 2017 via its blu-ray release on the Shout! Factory label, what emerged was nothing like the film its reputation suggested but instead a frustratingly uneven film that gets almost as much wrong as it gets right.

Co-written by Dowdle with his brother Drew (they co-financed the film themselves), it’s presented in the form of a fake documentary. Police raid a house in Poughkeepsie, New York, and find over 800 videotapes apparently shot by a serial killer (Ben Messmer) – the perpetrator is never caught so can’t be identified in the film itself, though he refers to himself as “Ed” in one of the videos and is credited as Edward Carver in the end credits, a name that is never actually uttered anywhere in the film. The rest of the film is a documentary analysing the tapes, ostensibly to try to understand the killer’s motivations and identify him as he is still at large and likely to still be killing. Whoever he is, he’s an exaggerated monster, his viciousness so over-the-top that it stretches credibility to breaking point. He starts his “career” by abducting a young girl from her front lawn and, mercifully off-camera, rapes and murders her. A young couple fall victim to him when he hitches a ride from them; his ever-changing modus operandi sees him framing a cop for his crimes, that cop then being executed by lethal injection; and throughout much of the film, there’s teenager Cheryl Dempsey (Stacy Chobsky) who he abducts, tortures, mutilates but leaves alive as a sort of plaything.

There has long been a strand of horror film where “torture porn” and “found footage” meet, resulting in films like the genuinely unpleasant August Underground trilogy (August Underground (2001), August Underground’s Mordum (2003), and August Underground’s Penance (2007)), The Great American Snuff Movie (2003) and Amateur Porn Star Killer (2007). The Poughkeepsie Tapes is arguably the most polished of these but it’s not without considerable problems. Some of the supporting cast, for example, are rather wooden, too obviously trying to act like they’re being natural but failing, though the acting honours are saved by the extraordinary Chbosky (John Erick Dowdle’s wife) whose final scenes, as a broken (physically and mentally) Cheryl appearing before the cameras, clearly suffering Stockholm syndrome as she tries to defend her captor, claiming that he loved her, are heartbreaking. We’re told that Cheryl killed herself shortly afterwards.

More seriously, the film has many issues in its presentation as a fake documentary. Some have complained about the use of music over the killer’s footage but that’s exactly the crass sort of thing true crime documentaries tend to do in real life. More damaging is the suggestion that someone – family members, police, the courts – would have signed off on the use of such harrowing footage for use in a documentary. These are people supposedly in the final moments of often agonising deaths, yet the footage has been handed over to the fictional filmmakers seemingly to do with as they will. It beggars believe that the faux documentary would ever have been made in the first place and belief in what we’re seeing is key to the success of these things. If the audience is pulled out of the conceit for even a second, then it’s game over and The Poughkeepsie Tapes keeps on tripping itself up in this regard.

It feels shallow, as though something is missing. Perhaps expectations were raised too high by the film’s lengthy relative absence and the reputation it undeservedly gathered. The anonymity of the killer is meant to be chilling (as it mostly would be in Megan is Missing ()), and at times it is. The revelation at the climax that he’s still out there somewhere, moved on from his original locale, is indeed worrying. The film leaves us with the suggestion that that he could be anywhere, even, if one FBI analyst is to be believed, sitting right next to you in the cinema – he speculates that the killer won’t be able to resist watching the documentary over and over again to feed into his sadistic fantasies. But the fact that we learn next to nothing about him and never get to the bottom of his motives leaves the film feeling like simply an excuse to parade his atrocities before us for entertainment. It has no insights to offer into the mind of a sadistic killer nor seems terribly interested in even trying to do so and as such it feels hollow at its core.

There are moments where it is genuinely unsettling, more by implication than through what it shows. It’s not as gory as its reputation might suggest though that’s not to say that it’s not often very upsetting, the killer revelling in the psychological torture of his victims before performing obscenely vile acts upon them (a woman has her husband’s severed head sewn into her abdomen). But it has moments of great suspense too – there’s a bone-freezing sequence where a pair of cookie-selling girl scouts are lured into the killer’s home, and we expect the very worst before they get away when the killed is distracted by noises made by the imprisoned Cheryl.

In the end though, it feels too much like it was a stab at “torture porn” thinly disguised with a veneer of supposed respectability by couching it all in the cloak of faux documentary. Had it looked deeper into the mind of the killer (he’s acting as much of a video chronicler of events as the makers of both the fictional and real The Poughkeepsie Tapes, a potentially fascinating avenue of enquiry), or offered any kind of insight into his actions, it might have played better. As it is, it’s a series of horrific vignettes held together by not always convincing talking heads and faked news footage.