Poughkeepsie Tapes Inspiration / Deconstruction

The Poughkeepsie Tapes (FULL MOVIE):

The trailer:

I wanted to do a blog post exploring this movie further and some of its themes and ideas as I was really inspired by its 'mockumentary' style and use of 'found footage'. In this post I will de deconstruct some sequences according to genre and perhaps take some inspiration to use within our own film, if we decide to make this horror style.

Movie background

• Released in 2007
• Directed by John Erick Dowdle
• Synopsis: In an abandoned house in Poughkeepsie, New York murder investigators uncover hundreds of tapes showing decades of a serial killer's work.
• This movie never properly released and doesn't have a DVD, despite having its trailer played in cinemas in America.

Trailer Deconstruction

• The font used is all capitals, white, almost glowing, almost like it's printed, with a TV kind of shuttering effect in the background, to reflect the 'tape' aspect.
• The trailer starts with a non-diegetic voice over of a 911 call, similar to other films e.g. The Devil Inside. The panicked voice clearly denotes to the audience that this is a horror film
• The trailer uses fast-paced straight cut edits between news programmes, articles, images and sequences of police and dead bodies, this clearly indicates to the audience that this is a documentary-style film, with found footage elements
  
• Non-diegetic sound is used to build fear in the trailer, screeching string sounds and also some electronic sounds, possibly supposed to sound like camera noises (found footage style). 
• Grainy editing is used with flashes to look like an old video camera has been used, with filters and distortion to make the footage appear to be from an old tape, conforming to the genre.

Inspiration for our killer from the movie:

• In this movie the killer is not a normal serial killer, the killer does not only capture the murders themselves, but the abductions, tortures and mutilations of his victims while never allowing himself to be shown on film unless entirely disguised. Throughout the film, he wears several different disguises, which was one of the points that inspired me the most.
  
• He also filmed other weird stuff, e.g. he had some kind of balloon fetish, and they found hours of tapes of women popping balloons etc. giving our killer some kind of personality and character.

• One tape shows that the killer performed a C-section on a  female victim, placing the severed head of her husband inside her womb before sewing her up again to later wake her from unconsciousness and film her reaction - this killer is clearly messed up and it only gets worse. He starts to change the way he kills and who he kills in order to keep his identity safe. 
• In one part of the film, it is only after the discovery of the tapes it becomes clear that one particular crime scene has been carefully arranged in order to obscure possible psychological profiling. 
  
• So for example, he kidnaps one girl named Cheryl and keeps her as a slave. In the end when she is found, she has developed Stockholm syndrome (a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with them) and actually kills herself, declaring her undying love for her 'master'. 

• At one point the killer changes his modus operandi (approximately translated as "method of operation")  and begins targeting prostitutes, he press now dub him "The Water Street Butcher", so the police believe yet another serial killer is at work.

Ideas

• Perhaps our film can be about found tapes, or a specific killer e.g. 'THE ___ TAPES' and be a found footage style film. 
• Masks - as mentioned in previous posts I am keen to use masks in our film. In this one he uses a kind of apothecary / doctors mask that they used during the Black Death, he also wears a full gas suit, a plain white mask with a black cat suit etc.
• For editing, the use of different colours, flashes, static etc that old tapes could use - we could look into something like that e.g. On final cut there is the effect 'Bad TV', perhaps we could research into that further.
• For weapons, he uses really basic tools sometimes e.g. rope for strangulation, basic hack saws, more advanced saws, power tools, etc so we could experiment with those too for Mise en Scene. (Picture right)