Some horror films take viewers into previously unimaginable realms of terror. Others take everyday situations and turn them into the stuff of nightmares. Skinamarink does a little of both: It takes common childhood fears and crafts an experience that, for many people, feels like an immersive trip into the darkest parts of their subconscious. This is a film that gives back what you put into it, allowing viewers to project their own nightmares and anxieties onto the screen to fill the darkness between the pixels.
Skinamarink’s snowy grain and distorted audio will feel familiar to different generations for different reasons. For older millennials and Gen-Xers, the fuzz recalls bargain-bin VHS tapes of the same public-domain cartoons that play on a living-room tube TV throughout the film — often the only source of light in a scene. To younger viewers, the movie’s scares might recall a horror prank video on TikTok — the kind that’s an unbroken shot of an empty room for what feels like an eternity, then a distorted face pops up and makes you jump out of your skin.
Skinamarink was indeed born in part on the internet. Writer-director Kyle Edward Ball’s YouTube channel, Bitesized Nightmares, is full of short films re-creating commenters’ nightmares. Ball noticed that many users’ nightmares were “eerily similar,†often describing a scenario in which the dreamer is a small child alone in a familiar house with their parents dead or missing and a monster is lurking in the shadows. Morbid stories from his sister’s work in child care fascinated him: “One time, a kid put a Barbie on the top stair of a dollhouse and said, ‘This is where they hide the bodies.’†With inspiration from these mini horror stories, the 31-year-old filmmaker decided to turn his first feature, an “old dark house†movie, into an experiment in dread.
Filmed in seven days with a crew of three on a CAN $15,000 budget at Ball’s childhood home in Edmonton, Alberta — his parents were “more than accommodating,†he says — Skinamarink unfolds from the perspective of two young children, 4-year-old Kevin (Lucas Paul) and 6-year-old Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), characters loosely based on Ball and his sister. The children’s understanding of a demonic event in their home is largely limited to muffled sounds through walls and thumping on floors and ceilings. All they know is that the doors and windows in their house are gone, and so are their parents.
Much of Skinamarink’s 100-minute runtime is made up of long, unbroken static shots filmed from a child’s perspective and staring down carpeted hallways toward half-open doors and the impenetrable darkness beyond. The camera lingers on blank walls, behind which we can hear faint whispering and scratching. Shadows from the TV flicker across the back of the sofa, which looks huge and imposing from the camera’s viewpoint on the ground.
Ball says his goal was to create a sense of uncanny apprehension, “as if Satan directed a movie and got an AI to edit it. An AI would make weird choices, like, ‘Yeah, I’m just gonna hold on this hallway of nothing for a while.’†But unlike, say, Michael Snow, a fellow Canadian whose most famous work, Wavelength (1967), is centered around a 45-minute zoom-in on the wall of a single room, Ball’s hypnotic long shots are punctuated by classic jump scares in the style of internet horror videos from the early aughts like the infamous “What’s Wrong With This Picture?†The tedium of these lulls heightens the dread that leads up to, and lingers long after, brief glimpses of eldritch terror.
Skinamarink got a warm reaction at its Fantasia Film Festival midnight world premiere in late July. Shortly thereafter, executive producer Jonathan Barkan facilitated a meeting between Ball and reps from the horror streaming service Shudder. (Barkan had seen the trailer for Skinamarink on Reddit, and was so impressed he reached out to Ball to discuss distribution.) By the end of the summer, a deal was made to release Skinamarink on Halloween 2023 in a handful of theaters — maybe a half-dozen art houses in major cities, standard stuff — before debuting it on Shudder.
Then, suddenly, it all seemed like it might fall apart. In late October, anonymous hackers broke into the streaming platform of a European genre festival (Ball declines to name the festival in interviews) and downloaded every film in the lineup — including Skinamarink. The hackers then uploaded the film to YouTube, ironically returning it to its point of inception. Reddit users started posting about this weird movie they had found that was the scariest thing they’d ever seen. Words like cursed and evil got thrown around. The buzz spread to TikTok, then to Twitter. A viral word-of-mouth sensation was born.
At the time, Ball was unable to enjoy his movie’s growing notoriety. The director remembers searching Twitter for the title of his movie (as one does) in the days leading up to Halloween. “That’s actually how I found out about the leak,†he says. The discovery prompted oppressive anxiety — what he describes as a “total emotional meltdown†that lasted for weeks. “I was terrified. I felt like I won the lottery, then it was like, Maybe you didn’t win the lottery. You’ll find out in a couple months.â€
But Shudder did not drop Ball, or Skinamarink, despite the director’s fears. When an email finally came in from Shudder’s vice president of programming, Sam Zimmerman, confirming the deal was still on, all the “physical, pent-up stress just exited my body,†Ball remembers.The leak did, however, move the film’s release timeline up by nine months. It debuted January 13 on more than 600 screens across the U.S. and Canada (including hundreds of AMC theaters), which, for a film as experimental as this one, is almost miraculous. (In suburban Chicago, it played at an AMC in a near-abandoned shopping mall — an ideal place to see it.)
Six days after its theatrical debut, Skinamarink crossed the $1 million mark at the box office. IFC Films announced that it would expand to 800 screens, where it grossed almost another half-million in its second weekend. The film’s haul is especially eye-popping when viewed next to Ball’s tiny budget. It was mostly crowdfunded through the online platform Seed&Spark, where Ball raised CAN $8,455 of the film’s $15,000 cost. (That’s 1/67th of $1 million for those without a calculator handy.) Filming at his parents’ house saved money — as did adding the child actors’ dialogue recorded later in overdubs rather than live on set.
Ball used only natural or incidental lighting while making Skinamarink — with the exception of blue filters added to on-camera lights used to create what he calls an “infrared†feel. The film’s fuzzy grain was achieved with a $100 package of Super 8 and 16mm filters overlaid individually onto each shot. Ball counts himself as the film’s sole postproduction crew member: He tweaked the film’s look, pacing, and scares for three months by himself. (He’s especially proud of his boyfriend’s reaction to the film’s first big jump scare: “His spine almost jumped out of his body,†he says with a smile.)
Skinamarink is a test case in both the benefits and perils of viral publicity. The hype after the leak attracted media attention to this otherwise obscure micro-budget movie. But Ball still believes that, in different hands, the leak could have killed his first feature. “I don’t want filmmakers to think, Oh we can put our movies on Pirate Bay, and it’s okay, because Skinamarink got that Shudder deal,†he says. “I think Skinamarink is the exception to the rule.â€
He describes the experience of “walking a very thin line†between gratitude for his online fans and anxiety about whether he’s one wrong move away from ending his career. He has seen fan art online by people who must’ve pirated the film based on when it was posted. On the one hand, he appreciates that someone took the time to create art based on his movie. On the other, their fandom is tied to an extremely stressful period in the filmmaker’s life. “At the end of the day, no matter how you watch the movie, if you love it, that makes me feel great,†Ball says. But “we — and when I say we, I mean me, Shudder, everyone — we would’ve preferred to have control over its release. Because it is still my movie.â€