I watched Erie as part of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, where it had its East Coast premiere on October 20, 2026.
Directed by Alison-Eve Hammersley and co-written by Hammersley and J. Batzli, Erie is a found-footage horror film that does something new with a genre that’s been going strong for over twenty-five years. We’re reminded of this because the film is set in 1999 – a date that obviously has significance for any fan of found-footage: it’s the year that the ground-breaking The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez) was released. With that choice, we’re back in the era when cameras, not phones, are used to record everything, archival materials consist of newspapers not websites, and anything resembling social media was in its infancy (the film’s protagonist does do some research via a very clunky online chat room).
Hammersley says that they set the film in the 90s so they could
“manifest that feeling of isolation for these characters. We’ve taken away the thing that connects all of us currently — the internet, our smart phones, and placed them in a situation where they truly to have to rely on each other and face their darkest selves.”*
Erie starts by telling us we’re in Erie, Pennsylvania, where an unusually high number of deaths have occurred. The first scene is one of those deaths – the apparent suicide of a young woman who, moments before, had been enjoying talking about blue flag irises. Her face goes blank, she disappears, and, moments later, her body thuds to the ground. The mystery of this young woman’s death – her name is Iris Scott (Aimee Paxton) – provides the impetus for the narrative, as we then meet Iris’s sister, Stella (Carly Stewart), an aspiring investigative journalist who is on a mission to find out what happened to her sister. And it’s not just her sister. As she tells her brother, Oscar (Grant Crater), a more reluctant co-investigator, there have been an unusual string of suicides in a bank of woods on the north-east edge of town. She wants to find out what’s behind them.
Through the afore-mentioned clunky chat room, Stella and Oscar hook up with a man named Red (Ryan W. Garcia), whose girlfriend was one of the suicide victims. He too is intent on figuring out why there are so many deaths in the area. Red is undoubtedly one of the stars of the film, bringing an intensity that stays (mostly) just on this size of crazy as he alternately helps and (supposedly jokingly) threatens Stella and Oscar when they meet him at his remote, rural home. Others will make this comparison, I’m sure, but Stella and Oscar’s encounter with Red is very much in the spirit of the fabulous Creep (Patrick Brice, 2014) with its unhinged encounters between Brice and Mark Duplass. (Indeed, Hammersley says that the two biggest influences on this film are The Blair Witch Project and Creep.)
Stella and Oscar
Red’s a big proponent of the idea that Ion Labs, which made lithium batteries and closed down in the 1950s, polluted the ground with heavy metals and toxins – causing mutations as well as strange behavior and suicide. Apparently, it’s “local legend.” Stella seems more convinced than Oscar is by this explanation, and so she steals Red’s map for their trek into the woods.
Of course, Stella and Oscar get lost – the second act of the film – and are stranded in the darkness, hearing things possibly pursuing them, sobbing and screams. While Stella continues to film, Oscar starts behaving erratically, blaming himself for allowing their sister to kill herself and seemingly harming himself.
The third act changes everything: the handheld camera Stella’s been using drops, and we start to see through an objective camera lens instead, as the rest of the film pretty much abandons found footage. This move undercuts the ‘authenticity’ of everything we’ve seen till now, and that’s a jolt because Erie has worked hard to make Stella and Oscar believable characters with understandable motivations. We’ve believed what we’ve seen and heard. As Hammersley says about this move:
“Up until this point in the film we’re quite firmly (and literally) planted in [Stella’s] POV. We understand her. We’re rooting for her. We see the world through her eyes. But this is the moment where we learn the real reason she’s out here.”
Identification is suddenly more difficult, character more slippery.
In fact, it seems even more than that: everything seems untethered. For me, in this last act, Erie is tapping into a recent trend of existentialism (Alexander Ullom’s It Ends and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms), where reality itself comes unmoored and meaning is up for grabs.
Erie is an well-constructed film that does something new with found footage, that draws you in and keeps you there, prompting you to think about it long after it’s over. The actors are great – convincingly pulling off the range of emotions demanded of them. Carly Stewart and Ryan W. Garcia deserve especial mention – and I’m ending with two shots of Stella (Stewart) from a scene I watched over and over again as it was just so compellingly weird. Hammersley says of it: “It’s an uncanny moment that begins to tip that there’s something amiss here before we fully reveal what’s happening to [Stella].”
Stella (Carly Stewart) in an incredibly compelling scene
*Comments by Alison-Eve Hammersley are from email correspondence on 20 October 2026.
