Refreshingly, as it turns out, no. No I am not. Butterfly Kisses ends up being a thoughtful, well-constructed examination of found-footage films wrapped around a decent premise, but the distancing inherent in its self-reflexivity ends up robbing the film of some of its actual horror.
We open cold on a young woman filming herself using an old digital video camera. It’s sort of that whole “if you’re seeing this, then something bad has happened” kind of narrative, and she asks that whoever finds her footage, please bookend it with the first and second half of the footage she’s filming now, and that they’ll know where the cut needs to go.
She says it’s getting harder and harder for her not to blink.
Already, I’m more into it that most found-footage films I’ve seen. I like that the filmmakers didn’t resort to beginning the whole thing with a title card clumsily explaining what we were about to see, and not over-explaining things. Here’s some weird old footage with a hook at the end, and then we cut to a well-lit, professionally-shot talking head setup. This introduces us to Gavin York, a young man who, while cleaning out his mother’s utility room, found a shoebox full of old MiniDV cassettes labeled “DO NOT WATCH.” The footage that opens the film comes from one of these cassettes, and according to Gavin, these cassettes document the efforts of two film students - Sophia and Fletcher - to make a documentary about a local urban legend known as Peeping Tom, or Mister Blink, or The Blink Man. It’s said that if you stand at one end of a particular railroad tunnel at midnight, and stare down the tunnel’s length until 1am without blinking, you can summon Peeping Tom into our world. Of course, nobody can verify this because everyone who tried it ended up mysteriously dead shortly afterward. You see, Peeping Tom haunts their summoner at the corners of their vision, a figure in the background moving ever closer, every time you blink, until he is close enough to strike.
What Gavin has done is take all of the raw footage on these cassettes and edit it down to a cohesive film, telling the story of Sophia and Fletcher’s documentary and the unfortunate events that followed it. He wants to restore the footage, clean it up, and sell it as a film, like The Blair Witch Project only, you know, true. And so he has hired a film crew to make a documentary about his attempts to restore and release the footage shot by Sophia and Fletcher 11 years ago. And it’s tough, because almost nobody can find any record of these two attending their particular school, all (well, almost all) of the experts they interview and faculty featured in their footage can’t be tracked down.
It’s like everyone involved with this film disappeared without a trace.
It’s all very meta - it’s a film about a film crew making a documentary about someone who has purported to dig up and restore the raw footage of a couple of film students who may have run afoul of a local urban legend. So we’re watching someone else watch someone who is in turn watching someone else. This is a lot of layers to keep up with, but it’s largely handled deftly, and it’s never too hard to follow. What it does mean, however, is that the entire film is really, really self-reflexive. It doesn’t feel too lampshadey or self-conscious, but it’s a mockumentary about a found-footage film, so characters in the film actively interrogate what makes found-footage films effective or not in trying to determine the veracity of this recovered footage and question Gavin’s motivation for pursuing the project at all. These conversations both comment upon what we’re watching and make diegetic sense. The film’s set in Maryland, and so the presence of The Blair Witch Project is felt throughout (that the recovered footage is from film students with a contentious relationship doesn’t hurt).
And as the film moves, on, we too begin to question what we’re seeing. Gavin never finished film school, and ekes out some income as a wedding videographer. His resentment and frustration at having never become the filmmaker he imagines himself to be is palpable, but we can also immediately see why he probably failed. He’s self-aggrandizing, possesses delusions of grandeur, and he’s really, really abrasive - basically his own worst enemy and utterly undiplomatic. He craves fame and wealth and has drastically overestimated the degree to which this footage is going to bring it to him. He makes all kinds of weird decisions, like trying to get it professionally restored when the whole appeal of such a project lies in the raw footage, trying to enlist the help of local paranormal enthusiasts, but refusing to share any more than he has to and expecting them to be bowled over by one bit of footage without any provenance, and alienating pretty much anyone he comes into contact with. Some of the most uncomfortable moments in this film come from the humiliations that Gavin keeps walking into, over and over again. He insists that the footage is genuine, but it comes to light that he’s made some very specific editing choices in assembling the raw footage - after all, he’s got a film crew making a documentary about all of this, and they’re asking questions of their own - and what he’s left out reveals some important things about Sophia and Fletcher. As we watch Sophia and Fletcher’s lives start to unravel, we’re also watching Gavin unravel, and we begin to question how much any of this is real.
While this is interesting from a narrative and thematic perspective, it does serve to make the film less scary for most of its runtime. As this film well knows, part of an effective found-footage film is trust - the audience has to easily suspend their disbelief and let themselves feel like they’re watching actual raw footage that someone has unearthed. By introducing elements of doubt both at the level of the raw footage and at the level of the person who claims to have discovered it, the overwhelming majority of the scary stuff ends up being less scary because our first impulse is to assume that it’s a cheat. I mean, of course it is, we’re watching a work of fiction, but within that fiction’s world, what makes it scary is the idea that Sophia & Fletcher’s footage is the real thing, and that Gavin and this film crew have unleashed something that was kept hidden. But throughout, we’re given reason to doubt what we’re seeing, and though the ending of the film does deliver some solid creepiness, having to do so on top of a somewhat convoluted story that we’ve been actively encouraged to disbelieve makes it feel like too little, too late.
This is a tough one for me, because I liked the idea of making a found-footage film which itself interrogates found-footage film (kind of like Digging Up The Marrow, but much, much smarter), and it’s reasonably well-acted, though the dialogue does get a little expository in places (but then again, we’re given reason to doubt what we’re seeing, so this actually sort of works too), there’s good attention to detail throughout. It never feels as ridiculous or implausible as some other found-footage films I’ve watched. The effects that are intended to give the raw footage its vintage look aren’t really that convincing, but everyone seems like real people for the most part and the locations all feel real and believable. I appreciate what the filmmakers (the actual ones) did and I thought it was done intelligently, but I think they ended up sacrificing what could have been a really good found-footage horror film for the sake of making a film about found-footage horror films. Still much better than I expected. but I wish it inspired more than a golf clap.
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It didn't seem to be an actual horror movie.It wasn't scary and I thought it would make a better thriller. I'm not sure why rotten tomatoes gave it 100%, but I don't agree. It was an interesting movie.
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