In the late 1990s, the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, experiences an epidemic of inexplicable deaths.
One of the victims is Iris Scott (Aimee Paxton), whose strange death in the woods is eventually ruled a suicide, like most of the other cases. Her sister, Stella (Carly Stewart), isn’t content with the explanation and, having discovered that Iris isn’t the only one, wants to dig deeper, roping their brother Oscar (Grant Crater) into her investigation.
An aspiring journalist, Stella plans to tape the process and all potential findings in hopes that it might advance her career. As the title card at the start of the film informs us, these tapes will be later found in the possession of one of the deceased.
Erie, which premiered at Beyond Fest and later screened at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, is a feature debut of director Alison-Eve Hammersley, which comes after extensive work on TV and multiple short films (most notably, Fragile.com, which also starred Carly Stewart). The choice of making a found footage horror as a debut feature both makes a lot of sense (because of financial reasons) but also demonstrates a lot of ambition on the author’s part – because of the complexity of creative execution.
For about two-thirds of the film, Hammersley follows the path that many found footage enthusiasts have walked before – with mostly familiar, but still impressive results. There’s the obligatory shaky camera, the many scenes of people wandering around and talking that lull the audience into a false sense of safety, and the abrupt movements in the dark corner of the frame that can potentially make both the characters and viewers jump on the spot. Ironically, it’s that sense of familiarity that might alienate some of the audience, since, despite all the lived-in banter Stewart and Crater can conjure, it’s just hard to shake a feeling that you’re watching something closely following a pattern.
This pattern is broken – and those become the best moments of the film – when Stella is contacted by Red (Ryan W. Garcia), the boyfriend of another victim, and she and Oscar visit him at his home. It’s then Erie starts feeling like it might have some surprises up its sleeve, as Red proves to be a great horror character. Someone who comes off as eerily eccentric and erratic but also can rationalize the most troubling parts of his behavior -- at one point, he hilariously insists that Stella and Oscar shouldn’t worry about an axe in his hands, because it’s actually a hatchet.
Then, as the characters head for the woods, the film goes full The Blair Witch Project. And Erie takes its most significant turn, which is also sure to be the most divisive. In its third act, the movie breaks its form and drops the found footage style for the conventional third-person view. The move is not unheard of: last year’s Shelby Oaks ditched the “found footage” pretense pretty early on, and the already classic Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon played around with balancing the mockumentary with traditional point of view. However, in Erie, this stylistic choice comes very late in the story without any artistic reasoning behind it, rather than making it easier for the authors to lay the path towards the ending they want.
But it’s not even entirely about the timing of the move or the authors breaking their own rules. The thing that weighs the film down is the fact that it strips itself of the opportunity to play out the emotional (and actual) resolution amidst all the creepy gloriousness the found footage format can offer.
With the most effective films in the subgenre, it’s never really about what you can actually see while the camera is shaking wildly – in fact, part of the fun is what you try but cannot fully catch. There is a certain dark magic in trying to decipher the sense among the video glitches and the patches of white noise – it’s a sensory experience that just cannot be surpassed by any traditionally shot imagery of dark woods.
The film screened at the 2026 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.