I’ve become a bit cagey about found footage horror films because they often make me queasy. With my condition, such nausea can last for days so it’s just not worth it. This is a shame because there are some very good examples of this sub-genre. I recently met another horror fan in the area and he suggested Butterfly Kisses. The camera doesn’t move too much, and, he said, it’s a film worth watching. He was right. It’s very meta. It has layers. And it’s unusual in that it both deconstructs and participates in the found footage to great effect. To start at the outside and work our way in, Erik Kristopher Myers leads a camera crew that has been hired by Gavin York, a down-on-his-luck filmmaker to film him making a documentary. That documentary is about two students, Sophia and Feldman, who are making a documentary for college on “Peeping Tom,” a local urban legend.
The set-up is intentionally like The Blair Witch project, setting itself in Maryland, with film students as victims. Eduardo Sánchez, co-director of Blair Witch, appears in the film, debunking the movie Gavin York is making. Each of these layers adds potential opportunity for any of the three sets of filmmakers to bend the truth, if not outright fabricate the story. It’s very cleverly done. Not only does it include Sánchez, who is a real-life found-footage horror film maker, but it also incorporates Matt Lake, author of a couple of the Weird US books, including Weird Maryland (and Weird Pennsylvania, which I have on my shelf). In a sense, movies like this warn against gullibility. In another sense they encourage it since people quite often have trouble distinguishing between cinema and reality. The layers only add to the veracity.
In case the title seems inexplicable, butterfly kisses are when a person’s face is close enough to brush your own with their eyelashes, causing you to blink. Peeping Tom is an entity that appears after staring at a certain railroad tunnel for an hour without blinking. Then, every time you blink after that, he’s a bit closer. When he finally reaches you, you die. He uses butterfly kisses to get you to take the last blink. Throughout the movie doubt is cast on those telling this account, but at the same time, there is enough evidence that you’re not sure, in the movie diegesis, if it might not be real. And the camera motion isn’t too bad. It’s effective found footage with a message.