19. The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)

The Poughkeepsie Tapes is a nasty entry in the found footage canon about officers discovering hordes of videotapes created by a serial killer who, evidently, enjoyed recording abductions, torture, and even desecration of his victims’ dead bodies. The grainy, rudimentary appearance makes the gradual realization of what type of cruelty you’re actually seeing hit even harder.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes is presented as a mockumentary, featuring news footage and interviews with investigators as they tackle this massive case and hunt for the killer’s identity, whose face is always obscured in the videos with some sort of theatrical mask. These videotapes involve grotesque situations one after the other, including a woman whose severed head of her husband is put into her womb. The voyeuristic nature of the videos makes the audience feel unwittingly complicit and dirty. The Poughkeepsie Tapes is certainly not for the faint of heart, taking immense pleasure in its macabre film aesthetic that assaults viewers with close-ups of gore and screaming pain.