The days when people were willing to entertain the idea that a found footage film could be real are long gone. We’ve come a long way since the Blair Witch Project era (1999-early 2000s), when information wasn’t as readily available as it is today and things couldn’t be verified on the spot. And yet, these movies still plant a seed of doubt in their viewers. By their nature, home recordings and phone recordings just evoke a certain degree of authenticity.
Erik Kristopher Myers’s Butterfly Kisses puts its story right in the middle of this dynamic.
The movie follows an aspiring filmmaker called Gavin York (Seth Adam Kallick) as he attempts to build a documentary out of a box of tapes he finds in his in-laws’ house. It has the words “Don’t watch” on it. Ignoring the warning, Gavin finds the tapes show the making of a documentary on a local legend called Peeping Tom, an entity that sticks to people who stare down a specific train tunnel for an hour without blinking.
Gavin, in turn, is followed by a group of filmmakers (director Erik Kristopher Myers among them) that are capturing the behind the scenes of his attempt to lift his project off the ground. As the story progresses, key pieces of evidence come to the fore that attempt to make the case that the Peeping Tom is real. The twist here is that the filmmakers involved all go lengths to get the footage processed and analyzed to determine whether it’s all a hoax or not, some with a more pronounced agenda than others.
Butterfly Kisses puts found footage under the microscope with the intention of pulling it apart and studying the things that are supposed to make it scary. Specifically, it looks at the effects that film source and video quality can have in laying the groundwork for terror. It’s a clever approach that questions the link between homemade video and veracity.
While the movie focuses more strongly on found footage cinema (on movies like Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity), it does also resonate with Creepypasta culture as well. Stories of this type gather their power from the idea that internet message rooms and conspiracy sites are sources of unspoken truths. These platforms often call out the mainstream as unwilling participants that rarely give these stories the benefit of the doubt.
The story of Peeping Tom, which lays out how the entity moves closer to those it haunts every time they blink after first contact, possesses that Creepypasta/urban legend quality that also made Slenderman such a towering figure in that arena. It’s all just creepy enough to make the audience question whether people have ever really tried conjuring the Peeping Tom, or if it’s even a possibility in the real world.
Kristopher Myers confronts this by verifying the authenticity of Gavin’s tapes. There are multiple scenes that involve a sound expert or a video specialist pouring over the tapes to either confirm or debunk the sights and sounds recorded on them. Whenever a Peeping Tom sighting is logged, someone with the knowledge to discuss it at a professional level is brought in front of the camera to explain.
One scene in particular stands out for its approach to jump scares. After the filmmakers find a tape that shows Peeping Tom jumping at the person holding the camera, straight at the audience as it were, the movie takes a smart yet unexpected turn by putting the sequence itself under close observation.
It feels like watching a magician reveal the secrets behind one of their most mesmerizing tricks. Audiences are put in a space it rarely gets to be on with these movies, unless they’re the kind that watches every single making-of featurette that comes with the Blu-ray. The result is disarming to the point I questioned whether I really wanted to know how the proverbial sausage is made. But the movie makes it all fascinating, like an exploration of darkness with a very bright flashlight in hand. The darkness is still there, just somewhat unrobed.
Butterfly Kisses’ genius lies in its ability never to reduce Peeping Tom into something that’s easily debunked, as if it were a story only the most gullible would ever truly fall for. It knows when to push doubt and when to accept its limits. Not every question regarding the haunting is answered, and some of them come off as stubborn (putting a few points on the board for the urban legend).
Director Kristopher Myers essentially dismantles and puts back together the found footage subgenre in Butterfly Kisses. The way he interrogates it comes across as invasive, but in the best way possible. Dissecting something whose success hinges on audiences not knowing how it all actually works is bold. Thankfully, it’s something Butterfly Kisses pulls off masterfully. Watching it will change the way you think about truth and believability when it comes to grainy and shaky videos claiming to have ghosts in them.
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