Butterfly Kisses

• Myers wrote the screenplay in eight days, telling Dread Central flatly: 'I wrote the script in eight days.'
• The first assembly ran about three hours; Myers always knew it had to come down. Blair Witch Project co-creator Eduardo Sanchez signed on, watched multiple cuts, and his feedback helped carve the lean 91-minute version Gravitas Ventures released October 23, 2018.
• Sanchez wasn't in the original script. Co-producer Cork Okouchi pushed Myers to ask anyway; after a roughly two-hour pitch Sanchez agreed to consult AND cameo as himself in a radio interview, dismissing the videographer's footage as a derivative Blair Witch ripoff.
• The Ilchester Tunnel is a real, still-active rail tunnel drilled through a cliff face near Ellicott City, Maryland, reachable only by crossing a trestle over the river below. To sell the documentary illusion, Myers cast real authorities on film, folklore, and psychology to appear as themselves commenting on the 'found' footage.
• The Peeping Tom legend was Myers's own invention, which he seeded online under a pseudonym as a viral campaign. It worked too well: author Shelley Davies Wygant included the haunted tunnel in her book Haunted Ellicott City as a genuine local legend; when Myers confessed he'd made it up, she reportedly called the stunt brilliant.
• The film holds a 100% Rotten Tomatoes critics score (7.8/10 average across five reviews) and won Best Local Film at the 2018 GenreBlast Film Festival.

The film is less about a monster than about how found footage manufactures belief. Sanchez's cameo caller calling it a Blair Witch knockoff is Myers planting the skeptic's verdict inside his own movie, then daring the videographer (and the viewer) to keep believing anyway. The real horror is conviction with no proof.

Peeping Tom may never exist on screen at all. The deeper read is that the videographer's collapse is self-authored, a man so desperate for the footage to be authentic that he destroys his life to validate it. The nested-documentary structure means every 'truth' arrives pre-edited by someone with a motive, so the apparition is really obsession wearing a folk-tale mask.

The closer-every-blink rule is a metaphor for looking away. The thing you refuse to confront only advances when you stop watching it, which makes the whole legend a parable about denial: the videographer who can't stop staring at the tapes is the one who gets the butterfly kiss.

A wedding videographer digs a box of MiniDV tapes out of his in-laws' basement and finds something that should have stayed buried: two film students, circa 2004, chasing a Baltimore tunnel legend called Peeping Tom. Stare down the Ilchester Tunnel for one unbroken hour without blinking and you summon him; after that, he closes the distance every time your eyes shut. The videographer decides the tapes are real and bets everything on proving it. Myers nests a documentary inside a documentary inside found footage, then asks the only question that matters: who's lying, and to whom.