Butterfly Kisses 2017

In May 2015, Gavin York, a struggling wedding videographer and film school dropout, stumbles upon a dusty box of tapes labeled “Don’t Watch” hidden in the basement of his in-laws’ newly purchased home. Driven by curiosity, he watches the footage and drafts an edit on an aging laptop. The tapes appear to be fragments of a documentary shot in March 2004 by two film students, Sophia and Feldman, who are investigating a local urban legend about a figure called “Peeping Tom.” The legend promises that if you stare down the Ilchester Tunnel at midnight for a full hour without blinking, Peeping Tom can be summoned. Once summoned, he draws in closer with each blink, culminating in a lethal confrontation as he uses a fluttering eyelash gesture, a crude nickname they call butterfly kisses, to force the victim to blink before killing them.

The students set up a camera to film the tunnel, hoping the camera might act as a stand‑in for a human eye. When they review the footage, they notice Peeping Tom appearing in the tunnel’s frame, and soon he seems to manifest in other clips they shoot. As the recordings pile up, Peeping Tom’s influence appears to infest the camera itself; turning the camera on and off to simulate blinking seems to bring him closer. Feldman’s grip on reality begins to unravel, and he is eventually murdered by Peeping Tom, leaving Sophia to continue the project alone.

Seeing a potential path to a filmmaking breakthrough, Gavin hires a crew to document his discovery and his pursuit of the legend. Yet the team discovers no verifiable records of Sophia or Feldman, fueling suspicions that the footage could be fake. They also uncover that Sophia and Feldman had previously won an award for a documentary that employed an actor to portray a real person.

With little interest from news stations or local groups, Gavin releases the footage online and schedules an interview with a radio host to spark attention. The broadcast draws harsh reactions from callers, including The Blair Witch Project co‑director Eduardo Sánchez, who dismisses the project as a derivative sham. Gavin’s single‑minded obsession strains his family life, culminating in his wife leaving after learning he drained their son’s college savings to fund the film.

Gavin guides the crew to meet him outside the Ilchester Tunnel, where they find him attempting to recreate the Peeping Tom ritual with a camera. A tense dispute emerges among the crew about whether to seek psychiatric help for Gavin, and accusations fly that Erik is pushing him toward madness in pursuit of a sensational story. When they hear sounds that suggest Gavin is running through the tunnel, they hurry to intervene, only to find that he has vanished, taking the camera with him.

Nine days later, Erik receives a package containing a DVCam film, a smaller parcel addressed to Sophia, Gavin’s journal, and a hotel keycard. At a hotel room, the crew discovers Gavin’s corpse in the bathtub. After weighing their options, they decide not to involve the police and Erik resolves to continue the project, insisting he wants to refragment the film as the story of Gavin rather than of Peeping Tom—though he refuses to say aloud whether he believes the legend is real.

In additional footage, Sophia, feverishly resisting the urge to blink, recalls a dream in which she could stare at the tunnel for the entire hour, only to realize the dream was real and that she had actually summoned Peeping Tom. She later claims that Peeping Tom is right in front of her, and in a shocking moment, she shatters a glass picture frame with a hammer and uses the shards to slice off her eyelids.

In a mid‑credits scene, Sophia, now in an insane asylum, appears to caress Peeping Tom’s face, leaving the fate of the legend ambiguously unresolved.