If you like The Blair Witch Project, this is the perfect found-footage movie for you: it’s just over 90 minutes long, it’s about a terrifying urban legend, and it has a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score.
Some of the best horror movies are found-footage films; just this past weekend, V/H/S Beyond dropped on Shudder with some of the best and scariest scenes of the year.
It can be a bit of a marmite category, for fair reasons. If you can’t stomach shaky-cam cinematography, neurotic characters, and abrupt endings, you won’t have a good time.
However, this one is a bit of an outlier. It’s a superb example of a great found-footage film that also tries to deconstruct and embrace the subgenre: Butterfly Kisses.
Butterfly Kisses is available to stream on YouTube in its entirety right now. You can also watch it on Tubi, and while you’ll need to put up with a few ad breaks, that’s a small price to pay… when you’re not paying anything to watch it.
It has a meta set-up: it’s presented as a documentary following Gavin York, a filmmaker who discovers a box of tapes in his in-laws house labeled, “Don’t Watch.”
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He watches a couple of the tapes, and after realizing their horrific and potentially viral nature, he makes an ethically dubious decision: he tries to finish the movie the students behind the tapes had started.
However, there’s no record of those students ever existing, and they were investigating a frightening local legend: Peeping Tom, a “flickergeist” who attaches itself to those stupid enough to dare him into existence. As their fate spools out via his film, his obsession with their story (and people’s reluctance to believe it) spirals out of control.
It was quietly released in 2018, but it’s built up a reputation in Reddit recommendations, on top of a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score. “It’s a fascinating look at how a filmmaker can become so obsessed with something, it destroys his life,” Chris Stuckmann said in his review.
“Butterfly Kisses feels like a familiar story, but it is told in such a disturbingly unique way that it is definitely worth checking out,” Michelle Swope also wrote.
You can also check out our list of the best found-footage horror films and our roundup of every horror movie coming to streaming in October 2024.
