investigating the "Water Street Butcher" after police discover 800 videotapes in an abandoned house. The Documentary Side
| Title | Author | Focus | |-------|--------|-------| | "Torture Porn and the Post-9/11 Horror Film" | Steve Jones | Contextualizes The Poughkeepsie Tapes within the torture-porn subgenre. | | "The Mockumentary as Digital Ghost: Unreliable Evidence in Horror Cinema" | Alexandra Heller-Nicholas | Discusses fake snuff aesthetics. | | "Found Footage Horror and the Ethics of Watching" | Peter Turner | Analyzes audience complicity — relevant to the film’s police-tape framing. | | "Low Res, High Fear: Compression Artifacts as Horror Rhetoric" (2021, JCMS ) | M. L. Stephenson | Technical paper on how pixelation/blocking creates dread (case study includes Poughkeepsie Tapes ). | thepoughkeepsietapes20071080pblurayh264a
The release of "The Poughkeepsie Tapes" had a profound impact on the local community, particularly for the families of the victims and those who had been directly affected by Spicer's crimes. | | "Found Footage Horror and the Ethics
The middle section of the string, "2007," anchors the work in time. It was a pivotal year for horror, a moment when the "torture porn" subgenre (epitomized by Hostel and Saw ) was beginning to wane, and the aesthetic of surveillance and reality television was beginning to take hold. The Poughkeepsie Tapes bridged these eras, offering the visceral cruelty of the former with the voyeuristic, low-fidelity aesthetic of the latter. The date serves as a reminder of the film’s genesis, a product of the post-9/11 era of surveillance anxiety where the idea of being watched—and watching the watcher—permeated the cultural subconscious. featuring interviews with FBI agents
: The film is presented as a post-mortem documentary, featuring interviews with FBI agents, forensic experts, and family members of victims. Found-Footage Integration