John Erick Dowdle (Full Moon Rising) wrote, directed, and edited “The Poughkeepsie Tapes.”
It is about a serial killer who stalks the streets of the same-named city in the US state of New York. Most of his victims are young women, but he has also killed some of the men who were with them.
Most of the movie is made up of the more than 800 tapes that were found in his house. It also has interviews with people who are supposed to be law enforcement officers and people from the families of the victims.
At the end of the movie, it looks like the filmmakers talk to Cheryl Dempsey, who is the only person the killer lets go.
She kills herself two weeks after the interview, which is a shame. Ed or Edward Carver, the person who killed her, digs up her grave and takes her body.
When the police find out what happened, they find another one of his tapes in her grave. Dowdle and the director of photography, Shawn Dufraine, made the movie look like a documentary. Here’s what we know about the situation.
Is The Poughkeepsie Tapes Based on a True Story?
No, “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” is not based on something that really happened. It was made using both the mockumentary style and the “found footage” style.
The movies “Bob Roberts” and “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for the Benefit of the Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” the animated film “Surf’s Up,” and the TV shows “The Office,” “Arrested Development,” “Parks and Recreation,” and “Modern Family” are all great examples of the first style.
The second style has become one of the most popular ways for independent filmmakers to make movies because it’s so cheap to do.
Some of the most well-known movies made in this style are “The Blair Witch Project,” “Paranormal Activity,” and “REC.” Dowdle has made two more found-footage movies since “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” came out: “Quarantine,” an American remake of “REC,” and “As Above, So Below.”
Drew Dowdle, who is John’s brother, is in charge of making the movie. The found-footage scenes in the movie look as real as possible because the Dowdle brothers hired unknown actors and used cheap cameras to film them.
The fact that the brothers had trouble getting the movie out only added to its mysterious feel. It was first shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in May 2007.
It was supposed to come out on February 8, 2008, but Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) never did, even though they advertised it. In July 2014, “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” was added to DirecTV, but it was taken off within a month.
A Syracuse-based news outlet said a few months after the movie came out that Edward Carver is based on a man named Kendall Francois, who killed 8 to 10 sex workers in Poughkeepsie between 1996 and 1998.
The main difference between them is that Francois didn’t make a video of his crime.
But in the same article, the paper talks about a report by the Circle in which Dowdle seems to say that he had never heard of Francois before making the movie.
