It has to be difficult to do anything innovative with the found footage genre, yet 2018’s Butterfly Kisses manages to do just that. Whether it is successful in doing so can only be determined by the viewer.
The twist on the concept is, in the present day, filmmaker Seth Adam Kallick has supposedly found a mysterious box under the furnace in the basement of his in-law’s house. The box has a label saying “DON’T WATCH” and is full of MiniDV tapes. Kallick supposedly would have just reused the tapes, had they not been of a deprecated format. Deigning to watch them, he discovers a supposed documentary student film project Rachel Armiger and Reed DeLisle had been working on in 2004.
The film on which the duo had been working was an investigation into local urban legend “Peeping Tom”, aka “The Blink Man”. Illustrations of this evil make it look like Slender Man. Typical of this kind of thing, summoning it is a real bitch and I wonder why anybody would bother to go through the effort. One has to stand at the end of a particular railroad tunnel at midnight and stare at the other end of it until an hour has passed. Blinking disqualifies you. And your reward for lasting the entire time is to have Peeping Tom get closer to you when each additional time you blink. Finally, when he gets right up to you, he bats his eyelashes, making you blink one last time before you die.
That sounds laughably ridiculous, and I think that was the intention. In fact, I’m pretty sure IMDB accidentally omitted the genre of comedy when it says this is a “found footage horror mystery”.
And the form the humor assumes here is “cringe”. Kallick is a super-punchable, pseudo-auteur whose dreams of moviemaking have been reduced to filming weddings. Even that isn’t paying the bills, as wife Eileen del Valle reveals she has regularly been borrowing money from her parents on the sly in order to make ends meet. Now, one might think Kallick would not want her to do that, except he will prove to be the deceitful shitweasel I assumed he was early on.
Questions about the film he found only makes it more likely he was somehow behind the 2004 footage himself. Nobody can find the student who supposedly shot that footage, nor can they find some other people associated with the production. In some movies, this would be signs of a cover-up but, frankly, I’m inclined to agree with some others interview who believe Kallick is likely behind the entire thing, and trying to pass off his own earlier work as footage he conveniently found.
These are the kinds of questions raised by the film crew that is doing the documentary we’re actually watching, one directed by Erik Kristopher Myers, who is playing that part in the film we’re watching while also being the real-life director of the film which encapsulates it.
He and his crew capture such uncomfortable moments as Kallick’s meeting with Matt Lake, author of Weird Maryland. When asked why Peeping Tom isn’t in his book, Lake replies, “It just wasn’t that strong of a story. It’s more what we call ‘fakelore’.”
Then there’s the unfortunate path Kallick pursues in getting validation for the 2004 footage: “We’re going to take to this to every professional in town we can find.” Needless to say, there aren’t many professionals in town, and the types of people he is referring to are paranormal investigators. A meeting where he shows footage to them ends with him retreating. One of the statements made to him in the meeting is “I’d like to know what kind of medications you take.” But that is nothing compared to the dressing down he will receive on a call-in show, where Ed Sanchez, one of the directors of The Blair Witch Project tells Kallick on-air he believes the entirety of the 2004 footage was faked by him.
In some ways, what is happening to Kallick is mirrored in the 2004 content, with Armiger and DeLisle failing to convince their professor that what they have is real footage of Peeping Tom and they aren’t just doing another found footage horror film. They had obtained a very brief image of The Blink Man at the end of the tunnel by letting the camera run for an hour and letting it be a surrogate for their eyes. The resulting image is so fleeting one might say you could blink and you’d miss it. When DeLisle is conveniently out of the room, that professor warns Armiger that, although DeLisle is a genius with the camera, he is on the seventh year of a four-year plan. Basically, his desperate need for a win might lead him to fabricate the results they were seeing.
Unfortunately, nothing in Butterfly Kisses is scary. This is coming from somebody who has been traumatized by the few superior films in the found footage genre and in ways I can’t imagine more conventional cinema attempting. This isn’t to say the movie is a failure, but it either doesn’t manage what it allegedly set out to do or it is a deliberate bait and switch. All I know is, the nesting-doll structure of the narrative is innovative, but also curiously to the detriment of cohesive storytelling. You might have a film being investigated by one director, who is being filmed by another director, but then one is left wondering who were the people filming that director, and it all becomes rather wearing. What I would have been most impressed by would have been if the film could have pulled back one additional layer and shown us watching the movie.
Dir: Erik Kristopher Myers
Starring Rachel Armiger, Reed DeLisle, Seth Adam Kallick