Brooklyn Horror 2026 Review: ERIE Debut Video Horror Overcomplicates Its Own Style

In the late 1990s, the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, experienced a surge in unexplained deaths.

One of the victims is Iris Scott (Amy Paxton), whose strange death in the woods is ultimately ruled a suicide, as are most of the other cases. Her sister Stella (Carly Stewart) is not satisfied with the explanation and wants to dig deeper when she learns that Iris is not the only one, drawing her brother Oscar (Grant Crater) into her investigation.

Stella, an aspiring journalist, plans to videotape the process and any potential discoveries in the hope that it will advance her career. As the title card at the beginning of the film indicates, this tape would later be found in the possession of one of the deceased.

herewhich premiered at Beyond Fest and then screened at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, is director Alison-Eve Hammersley’s feature debut and follows extensive work on television and several short films. Fragile.comCarly Stewart also stars. The choice to make a found footage horror for a debut feature not only makes a lot of sense (for economic reasons), but also shows a lot of ambition on the part of the writer due to the complexity of the creative execution.

For about two-thirds of the film, Hammersley follows a path taken by many found-footage enthusiasts before him. It’s mostly familiar, but still delivers impressive results. A shaky camera is essential, there are scenes of people wandering and talking, lulling the audience into a false sense of security, and sudden movements in dark corners of the screen that can make both characters and audience jump on the spot. Ironically, it’s precisely that familiarity that may alienate some in the audience, as for all the banter Stewart and Crater are able to conjure, it’s hard to shake the feeling that a pattern is being closely observed.

This pattern is broken, and the film’s best moment becomes when Stella contacts Red (Ryan W. Garcia), the boyfriend of another victim, and she and Oscar visit him at his house. That’s when here With Red proving to be a great horror character, it’s starting to feel like he might have some surprises up his sleeve. Although he appears to be a strangely eccentric and erratic person, he is also able to rationalize the most problematic aspects of his behavior. At one point, he cheerfully insists that Stella and Oscar don’t have to worry about the ax in his hands. Because an ax is actually a hatchet.

Then the movie becomes full as the characters head into the forest. The Blair Witch Project. and here We are about to reach the most important turning point, and it is also certain to be the most divisive. In the third act, the film breaks form and drops the traditional third-person, found-footage style. This move is unprecedented: last year shelby oaks It abandoned the pretense of “found footage” quite early on and was already a classic Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon I played around with the balance between mockumentary and traditional perspectives. however hereThis stylistic choice comes very late in the story without any artistic reasoning behind it, rather than allowing the author to more easily lay the path to his desired ending.

But it’s also not about when to move or when the author breaks his own rules. What weighs down the film is the fact that it deprives itself of the opportunity to reproduce emotional (and real) resolution in all the gruesome glory that the found footage format can offer.

In the most effective films in the subgenre, it’s not about what you can actually see while the camera shakes violently. In fact, part of the fun is something you try but can’t fully capture. There’s a certain dark magic to trying to decipher sensation between video glitches and patches of white noise. It’s a sensory experience that cannot be surpassed by traditionally captured images of dark forests.

The film was screened at the 2026 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.