The action takes place in Poughkeepsie, a small town about 100 miles north of New York City. There, in an abandoned house, hundreds of videotapes showing torture, murder and other atrocities of all kinds are found. These are the work of a serial killer who films his own misdeeds and has been active in the region since the 1990s. After the FBI discovered some 240 hours of footage, the killer’s horrific journey is the subject of a documentary that includes testimonies from various FBI agents (investigators, instructors, medical specialists of all kinds…), interviews with victims, their relatives but also, and this is the most frightening, excerpts from the tapes filmed by the serial killer himself. So hold on to your armrests and welcome to real horror, you are watching The Poughkeepsie tapes…
The Poughkeepsie Tapes, a film based on the same principle as “Cannibal Holocaust” and “The Blair Witch Project“, two “mockumentaries” or “documentarians” famous for having made people believe that certain scenes they had made and shown were real, was the source of a real controversy when it was released in theaters in the United States. It must be said that the film crew had initially left doubt about the authenticity of the videos of the murders in the film by claiming that they were real archive documents. So let’s clear up any misunderstanding right away: this feature film, despite appearances, is not a snuff film. It must be said that the confusion was cleverly maintained, the film being partly inspired by Kendall François, a proven serial killer, who would have committed his acts near Poughkeepsie in the state of New-York in the 1990s. But this one did not film his murders, he “would have just” between 1997 and 1998, killed eight prostitutes before being arrested and incarcerated by the police. It would also seem that John Erick Dowdle, the director of “Quarantine“, the American remake of “REC“, was inspired by several serial killers to create his character. Among them are: Edmund Kemper and Ted Bundy, authentic serial killers, but also two murderous couples from the news, the first of whom filmed all his crimes and the second of whom kidnapped a 19 year old girl to make her a slave for six years.
Presented at the Tribeca Film Festival (created by Robert De Niro to celebrate New York City), The Poughkeepsie tapes is a fake documentary. The story is quite simple and can be summed up in a few lines: after discovering hundreds of videotapes containing murders, the FBI decides to put together a report on the bloody path of the serial killer who is active in the town of Poughkeepsie and who made these VHS. This report is the film we are watching. Just like the wonderful “Man Bites Dog” but without the black humor, we see the activities of the killer through some excerpts of his tapes (reminding us of the videos of the pirate channel in Cronenberg’s “Videodrome”), interspersed with testimonies and explanations of individuals such as the mother of one of the victims, a forensic doctor, FBI profilers and many other characters aiming at making the documentary as credible and authentic as possible. And it works! For such an undertaking to hold up, John Erick Dowdle uses a cast of complete strangers (for the record, Stacy Chbosky, the heroine of the film, is also the director’s wife), a soundtrack that alternates between muffled and cavernous sounds, and the absence of themes (except for the opening credits, which are quite stressful) going hand in hand with the raw and violent character of some scenes, a grimy image (that of the killer’s films) but being in perfect harmony with the general gloomy atmosphere built by the filmmaker. A great work!
But why is it so disturbing? First of all, the killer is elusive, which frustrates the viewer even more as he watches him wander around with impunity. Choosing his victims randomly and without a defined modus operandi, he confuses all the prognoses of the profilers, who all give contradictory reports. We follow the case through the prism of interviews with specialists and other collateral witnesses, as well as through the killer’s point of view, thanks to numerous sequences in which the assassin wanders the streets, camera in hand, looking for future victims, or performs multiple tortures on the prey he has chosen. However, as the investigation progresses, we will learn a little more about this killer. He will gradually reveal himself. Thus, we will go from a voice-over to a masked face topped by a bird’s beak (like those in the commedia dell’arte). But that’s all, we won’t know more about him, except for his disturbed mind while contemplating his acts, each one more macabre than the other.
Secondly, the film is completely unhealthy. The first victim of the film will be a little girl. The spectator is therefore warned: he will not be morally spared. We don’t see anything of the murder itself (as for a majority of the homicides of the feature film), everything taking place off-screen, but still! Not content with attacking an eight year old girl, the murderer will attack other girls, but also couples and young women of all ages. In short, he is not selective and chooses his victims without any precise logic, which makes it even more shivering!
Thirdly, the film shows an absolute cynicism. The serial killer will sequester one of his victims for years and transform her into a slave to whom he will subject her to the worst physical torture and moral abuse. Cynicism is almost omnipresent in the film (cf. the scene where he shows all his compassion to the mother of one of his victims or the one where someone else is taken and executed in his place!)
For all the above reasons, The Poughkeepsie tapes is not a film to be put in front of any eyes: it is totally amoral and without any taboo, while being filmed coldly. The direction, rather smart, does not show any gore, the suggestion or the off-screen being used most of the time, which will disturb much more. The director also knows how to maintain the tension, alternating scenes of murders off-screen, interviews with various criminologists, torture sessions shown on-screen or even testimonies of victims’ relatives, which makes one feel uncomfortable whatever one has to look at. Subtly, the atmosphere becomes heavy and the killer more and more confident and enterprising as he goes unpunished. The escalation towards violence then goes crescendo, which is sometimes at the limit of the bearable.
As captivating and irregular as it may be, the life of a horror film reviewer is sometimes invaded by lassitude in front of the overflow of swallowed turnips that follow one another and look the same without being able to remember any title. Heavy, rhythmic and without concession, The Poughkeepsie tapes sweeps away all the insipid purges ingested until now. This atypical work constantly shakes us up and plunges us, thanks to its documentary approach, into the world of a killer with no conscience. One cannot leave unscathed such an outpouring of violence, both moral and physical, so well orchestrated. As long as you get into it completely – which was my case – this movie is a pure UFO that cannot leave without reaction. For the most demanding, it will nevertheless constitute a very well chiseled “documenter”, even if a slight smell of déjà-vu could be felt…
