‘Erie’ Teaser Takes a Camcorder Back to Fall 1999
Two siblings, one camcorder, and a string of suicides in a Rust Belt town on a lake. The first teaser for Erie is out, and the found-footage feature has its world premiere at Beyond Fest on October 1, dropping the viewer into the fall of 1999 with nothing but a viewfinder for company.
Alison-Eve Hammersley directs from a script she wrote with J. Batzli, her first feature after a run of shorts that landed on ALTER. Carly Stewart plays Stella and Grant Crater plays Oscar, siblings who come home to Erie, Pennsylvania, with an old camcorder and start asking why so many people in town have died the same way, their own sister among them. Ryan Garcia plays Red.
The teaser runs sixty-three seconds and spends nearly all of them on the two of them moving through a dilapidated building, calling for Red, getting nothing back. No creature, no title-card reveal, no scored jump. For found footage that is the right trade: the format lives on the discipline to hold a shot on an empty doorway a beat longer than is comfortable, and a teaser that withholds is a teaser that trusts the movie behind it.
Beyond Fest First, Brooklyn Next
The world premiere is October 1 at the Los Feliz 3 in Los Angeles, a 7:00 p.m. slot on a Beyond Fest calendar that has become the loudest room in American genre exhibition. The East Coast premiere follows at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival later in the month. No distributor and no release date have been announced.
Hammersley produced the film with Anna Golin for Rat’s Nest Pictures, alongside Thomas Hartmann, George Henry Horton and Matt Gossen. She is not arriving from nowhere. Fragile.com went through AT&T’s Hello Lab mentorship program under Lena Waithe and has since run past three million views on ALTER, and You’ll Only Have Each Other was her AFI thesis film. She also has the horror feature Solstice in development at BoulderLight Pictures, the outfit behind Barbarian, and the series Hallowdale set up with Temple Hill. Batzli won the Shore Scripts Short Film Fund for Little Anna.
Beyond Fest Is Thick With Tape This Year
Erie is not the only camcorder movie on the schedule. V/H/S/MIXTAPE premieres at the festival before it hits Shudder on October 9, and the subgenre is having a good autumn generally, with Hell House LLC going back into theaters for its tenth anniversary on October 29. Hammersley’s film is the smallest of the three by a wide margin, which has historically mattered less here than anywhere else in horror. Found footage is the one corner of the genre where a first-time director with a camcorder and a condemned building starts on roughly even footing with a studio.
What the teaser will not say is whether Erie has an answer for the suicides or only a theory, which is the whole question for a film built on conspiracy and grief in equal parts. A Beyond Fest crowd will find out first, on a Thursday night in Los Feliz.
