‘Skinamarink’ Is An Extremely Online, Word-of-Mouth, Lo-Fi Horror Sensation

Like most works of determined minimalism, Kyle Edward Ball’s new film Skinamarink is easily enough described: a series of static, low-angle long takes trap us in the first-person perspective of two frightened children unable to find Mom and Dad, and then trap those children in a haunted house thick with atmosphere. Stretching a $15,000 budget cobbled together from crowdfunding sites, Ball converted his parents’ Edmonton home into an ominous wood-paneled labyrinth of vanishing doors and windows, his camera trained on corners of ceilings, carpets, discarded toys, and eerie glowing TVs playing vintage public domain cartoons from Fleischer Studios. The scant crumbs of dialogue (subtitled for our convenience) are warped and barely audible, spoken in what Radiohead referred to as “unborn chicken voices.” Every now and then, the tense idyll of plotless negative space will be shattered by a high-decibel shock coming out of nowhere.

In the sparseness of its content, Ball’s feature debut is commendably unlike anything else in theaters, the improbable stopover for this DIY curio before it arrives at its permanent home on boutique streaming service Shudder (release date still TBD). Infiltrating brick-and-mortar movie houses has placed the outsider object on the radar of career critics processing it with an accordingly filmic set of reference points, some seeing a kid-brained descendant in the lo-fi lineage of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, others drawing on the “slow cinema” canon of severe arthouse selections in which the real-time passage of minutes becomes the whole point. But its true home is online, where a circulating torrent of a leaked copy exploded into a genuine word-of-mouth sensation on the fringes of platforms like Reddit and TikTok. One video response praising Ball’s output as “actually, truly disturbing” boasts thousands of likes, as do many, many others.

@christopherkiely

This Movie Will Make Sure You Don’t Sleep Tonight 😳 #scarymovie #scarymovies #horrormovie Skinamarink Is Absolutely Terrifying 😱 #skinamarink #skinamarink2022

♬ Creepy and simple horror background music(1070744) – howlingindicator

More than just a funding mechanism, PR incubator, and focus group (Ball describes his first feature as “the movie that Reddit made”) for the project, the internet also gives Skinamarink the aesthetic template that codifies this alienating collection of stylistic choices. Gen Z has taken this notion and run with it, but even a gnarled, weatherbeaten millennial such as I remember the videos where you’d stare at your chunky computer monitor until Regan from The Exorcist jumped onto the screen and screamed at you. A glut of digital jetsam exists for the sole purpose of replicating POV (a term misused on social media video channels with such frequency that it may very well soon collapse into itself) unencumbered by narrative, and a chunk of that content-mass gestures in the direction of horror with primally unsettling audiovisual triggers. The same creative impulse that gives us “Rainy Night Coffee Shop Ambience with Relaxing Jazz Music and Rain Sounds — 8 Hours” can be directed towards something like the three-hour mix “Nostalgic Old Kids records but you’re a Dead Child’s ghost, to fall asleep, study, or relax to.”

This is not an especially incisive insight, seeing as Ball was making these videos himself as recently as one year ago on his YouTube channel “Bitesized Nightmares,” though it does raise the question of whether feature length — here is the rare instance of an indie filmmaker who must cut down rather than expand the proof-of-concept in order to fit a cineplex, his first forays in the form more like early longs than early shorts — represents a reimagining or mere resizing of his techniques. Ball’s primary goal seems to be the simple simulation of a vibe evident in the computerized faux-retro textures, the artificial analog celluloid grain and crackle-pops in the sound design harkening back to an era of childhood he was too young to live through and right on time to nostalgically reiterate. His film’s novelty factor depends almost entirely on the context of its consumption, a commonplace shadow-web genre rendered revelatory by its adjacency to the mainstream; it is an experimental piece to the same extent as any given hyperedited TikTok, the rulebook not tossed in the trash but rewritten along a different viewing clique’s collection of rules.

Presumably set before the advent of Windows 95, the internet is a medium to Skinamarink instead of a presence, a reversal to the usual order of films attuned to the ideas of our plugged-in world over its sensations. Forward-thinkers like All About Lily Chou-Chou or Cam demonstrate a finely honed understanding of the paradoxical push-pull between isolation and connectivity without going so far as to reproduce the feeling of deadened hours spent sitting in the dark and staring into the infinite illuminated scroll. 2014’s Unfriended and other “desktop thrillers” literalize the matter by fitting a laptop screen’s readout to fill the frame, a matter-of-fact presentation that doesn’t quite capture the ambience creeping in to envelop a compulsive clicker in the dead of night. Jane Schoenbrun’s recent and actually, truly disturbing We’re All Going to the World’s Fair may be the lone exception in its expertly holistic approach to the act of web-surfing on both theoretical and visceral levels — the rare specimen that feels less like a link forwarded by a friend and more like an offshoot of some cursed backchannel clip stumbled upon at 3 a.m.

Schoenbrun isn’t afraid of silence or stillness, though in this case, the unnerving lacunae all work in service of a studied depiction of the Internet’s merits and hazards. A lonely young woman named Casey posts videos of herself as she slowly descends into madness, partaking in a macabre viral trend known colloquially as “creepypasta,” just one of the virtual-native formats touched on in a condensed survey that also includes ASMR recordings and Skype chats. As the spans of time spent in an enclosure of pixelated blackness rewire Casey’s mind and then body (Schoenbrun, who identifies as nonbinary, has talked about the influence their transition had on the themes of startling personal metamorphosis), an older man reaches out to her with concern that could be innocent interest as readily as predatory grooming, the breakdown of reality distorting the sort of remote yet intimate relationship only built through a Wi-Fi connection. All manner of disorientation tactics, key among them the jittery flatness and blurred motion of webcam cinematography, push this loose, ambiguous plot in a Wikipedia-wormholed daze.

Critics don’t have the best track record when assessing unfamiliar expressions of the rising generation’s zeitgeist, and so there’s a mix of resignation and excitement to my inkling that my contemporaries and I have yet to fully comprehend this nascent school of cinema or witness its complete evolution. Either way, movies sure aren’t going to get any less online as the years go by, if the preponderance of meme-slang and TikTok flourishes all over studio comedy are any indication. Even as their number increases, the online films meaningfully dialed in to the complex mental and physical experience of operating a computer will likely be few and far between. Jolting and uncommercial, these documents of the now announce the burbling of a new conceptual framework, but Ball’s film shows us a currently trendy vision of the past; Schoenbrun’s is a transmission from the future.

Skinamarink will land on Shudder sometime in 2023, but if you’re lucky, you might be able to see it sooner at a theater near you.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.