I don’t know how much longer I can go without blinking
Main Cast: Seth Adam Kallick, Rachel Armiger
Director: Erik Kristopher Myers
By its very nature, the found footage genre is meta. But sometimes you find a movie that comes full circle and doubles down on the idea of being meta until what you’ve got is a movie that’s four layers deep.
In 2018’s BUTTERFLY KISSES, we’ve gone beyond the concept of meta and into some new territory I don’t think the genre has yet explored.
Written and directed by Erik Kristopher Myers, BUTTERFLY KISSES is about a small-time director who discovers a box of old videotapes and decides to make a movie about them.
In the basement of his in-laws’ house, Gavin York (Seth Adam Kallick, author of AMERICAN NIGHTMARE: A Tale of the Dead West) finds a box of videotapes and, when he starts to go through them, he discovers an old senior thesis by film student Sophie Crane (Rachel Armiger) and her camera operator “Feldman” in which they try to find out the truth about an old local urban legend called Peeping Tom who is sort of like a Weeping Angel from DOCTOR WHO. He appears at the end of a tunnel along some local train tracks, but he only gets closer when you blink.
Gavin is fascinated with the project, wondering what ever happened to Sophie and Feldman, so he hires another documentary film crew to follow him as he tries to drum up publicity and get to the bottom of this mystery.
So we’re watching a movie about a guy trying to release another movie about two film students making a movie. And to get that final level of meta, in the end, we’re watching the documentary crew and their struggles to put together a movie about a guy putting together a movie about a pair of students who are making a movie.
The mind boggles.
But don’t let it boggle too much; there’s still a really interesting concept at work here in Peeping Tom.
Legend has it that he can only move when you don’t see him, so only when you blink. The local legend says you have to stare down this dark tunnel at midnight for a straight hour without blinking, so Sophie and Feldman get the idea of setting up a camera on the tracks and filming the tunnel for an hour to simulate an unblinking eye. Only it works too well. Now, every time they turn the camera on or off, that counts as a blink, and Peeping Tom starts to appear in the background of their footage. And every time the camera turns back on, he’s a little closer.
The concept at the heart of BUTTERFLY KISSES was very interesting and is the stuff of nightmares in a found footage world.
Meanwhile, Gavin York is teetering on the precipice in trying to get this project together. A legit filmmaker who has been relegated to shooting wedding videos to make ends almost meet, his wife has one foot out the door, and everyone he presents the Crane/Feldman footage to either doesn’t believe him or believes too much and wants nothing to do with it.
The two main characters here, Sophie and Gavin, are two sides of the same coin. Rachel Armiger gives a frenetic performance as Sophie, all crazy eyes and terror, while Seth Adam Kallick’s Gavin is desperate and spiraling. Peeping Tom is coming after Sophie, but it’s creditors and a never-ending struggle for legitimacy that are nipping at Gavin’s heels. The bills are piling up and his wife’s “for richer or for poorer” is being strained to its limits, but Gavin knows if this movie works, they’ll be set for life. But in this day and age of everyone having a movie studio in their pocket, convincing even a local paranormal investigation group that his movie is legit is proving more than he can handle.
I really dug BUTTERFLY KISSES. It looks cheap, and probably was when compared to bigger “found footage” movies like, say, UNFRIENDED and its sequel, but the ideas here are impressive.
The monster isn’t just coming closer to you on the train tracks, but is now inside this thing that you take with you, that you don’t see how close he is until you watch the footage in playback, that’s terrifying and it works.
And then as we pull back even further, once Gavin’s spiral has gotten out of control and we focus on the documentary crew themselves, all bets are off, and the movie has gone off the rails. And I was there for it all.
I won’t spoil the ending here, but it’s a found footage horror movie, so I think we all know it doesn’t go well for anyone involved. All I can say is I dug BUTTERFLY KISSES. It wasn’t perfect, but for a random found footage movie I stumbled across on Freevee, I saw it as an afternoon well spent. Sadly, Myers died in 2021, but I would have definitely been there for whatever his next movie was, especially if it was found footage; he was a man with really big ideas and the talent to pull them off.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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