Butterfly Kisses 2018

In May 2015, Gavin York, Seth Adam Kallick, a struggling wedding videographer and film school dropout, stumbles upon a dusty box of tapes labeled “Don’t Watch” in the basement of his in‑laws’ newly purchased home. He watches them and edits the footage on an aging laptop, turning the discovered material into a new project that promises a breakthrough he desperately seeks.

The tapes are fragments of a March 2004 documentary by Sophia Crane, [Rachel Armiger], and Feldman, [Reed Delisle], who set out to test a local urban legend about a mysterious figure known as Peeping Tom. According to the legend, Peeping Tom can be summoned by staring down the Ilchester Tunnel at midnight for a full hour without blinking. Once summoned, he closes in with each blink, performs a brutal “butterfly kiss” by fluttering his eyelashes on the victim’s face, and then kills them. The students install a camera to film the tunnel, hoping the lens will act as a human eye. But when Peeping Tom appears in the tunnel footage, he also starts to show up in other clips they shoot, suggesting his presence has infected the camera itself. Each clip filmed while the camera is on brings him closer, and Feldman’s grip on reality begins to fray as the danger escalates, until he is murdered by Peeping Tom and Sophia is left to carry on alone.

Driven by a hunger for a filmmaking break, Gavin hires a crew to document his discovery of the tapes and his pursuit of proof. The team, headed by Erik Kristopher Myers, quickly suspects the whole project may be a hoax or a trap, especially when they uncover that Sophia and Feldman had previously won an award for a documentary that used an actor to portray a real person. The mystery deepens as Gavin’s online gamble fails to attract credible interest from news outlets or local groups, so he turns to an improvised publicity tour—an online posting paired with a radio interview that he hopes will ignite attention.

During the interview, callers mock the existence of Peeping Tom, including Blair Witch Project co-director Eduardo Sánchez, who dismisses the whole thing as a derivative curiosity. The ridicule, combined with the mounting strain of the project, places a growing wedge between Gavin and his family. His wife ultimately leaves him after discovering that he drained their son’s college savings to fund the investigation and the film.

The tension peaks when Gavin guides the crew to a rendezvous outside the Ilchester Tunnel, intending to reenact the ritual with a camera. The group debates whether to intervene or seek psychiatric help as Gavin’s behavior grows more obsessive. They hear a frightening noise that sounds like him running through the tunnel, and when they reach the spot, he has vanished, taking the camera with him.

Nine days later, Erik receives a package containing a DVCam film, a separate note addressed to Sophia, Gavin’s journal, and a hotel keycard. Inside a hotel room, the crew discovers Gavin’s lifeless body in the bathtub. After weighing their options, they decide not to involve the police and instead choose to continue the project, with Erik reframing it as Gavin’s story rather than a straightforward study of Peeping Tom. When a crew member asks whether Peeping Tom is real, Erik remains silent, offering no clear answer.

Additional footage reveals Sophia recounting a dream where she stares down the tunnel for the full hour without blinking, then confronts the terrifying possibility that she actually summoned Peeping Tom. She claims to have found a way to defeat him, but the scene ends with a shattered glass picture frame and the ghastly image of her cutting her eyelids with the shards.

In a mid‑credits moment, Sophia appears to be confined in an insane asylum, where she reaches out and seems to caress Peeping Tom’s face, leaving the question of what is real and what nightmare still lingering.