Gavin York (Seth Adam Kallick) is a wanna be filmmaker who is also a videographer for weddings and birthdays to put food on the table. When his in-laws find a box of video tapes that were left in the crawl space of the home they just purchased, they give the tapes to Gavin in case he can use them. The tapes were made by Sophia Crane (Rachel Armiger) with the help of her friend Feldman (Reed DeLisle) for a film school project.
Gavin watches the last tape and discovers that Sophia’s project was the documentation and search for proof of a local urban legend. The legend is based on a creature called “Peeping Tom”. According to the legend, if you stood on the train track leading into the Ilchester Tunnel at midnight and stared down the tunnel, without blinking, for an hour, a dark and mysterious figure would appear. The creature has several names, “Peeping Tom”, “The Thin Man” “Ilchester the Molester” or “Blink Man”. Once you saw him, every time you blinked the figure would appear to move closer until it was right up on you. Then you die.
Gavin decides to complete the film that the students started and ends up down a rabbit hole.
“Butterfly Kisses” was released in 2018 and was written and directed by Krik Kristopher Myers. It is a horror movie in the lost footage style.
This was actually a fun movie to watch. The editing between the various subplots was good. There are a few plot holes in the film, but there are also a few good jump scares. Is this a true story? No. It is based on a legend, but there is no proof that the legend is true. The movie is basically a mockumentary. The filmmaker character, Gavin York, got a little tedious, but otherwise it was an enjoyable film.
The interesting thing about this movie is that it is technically a movie within a movie within a movie. You have the students who are making a film, in black and white, about an urban legend. Then you have the filmmaker making a movie from their tapes by splicing the tapes together in sequence. In addition, the filmmaker is also making a documentary about the making of the student’s film.
What propels the movie into the realm of ‘could be’ is that the filmmakers interviewed some real people who played themselves. For example, Matt Lake, who wrote the “Weird USA” series of books, and Eduardo Sanchez who directed “The Blair Witch Project” 1999 are interviewed as themselves and as experts in their particular fields.
The Peeping Tom legend started during the Depression. Supposedly, Peeping Tom was an old homeless blind man that was hit and killed by a train. Now his ghost haunts the tunnel. The tunnel, which is a real tunnel, is part of the B&O railroad in Ellicott City, Maryland. The term butterfly kisses fits into the legend this way; when Peeping Tom gets close enough, he flutters his eyelashes on your cheek. That is called a butterfly kiss. The feeling of the lashes on the face causes the person to blink. That is when Tom strikes.