‘Skinamarink’: The Journey From $15,000 Horror Indie to Terrifying Viral Phenomenon

Legos have never been as ominous as they are in Skinamarink, a haunted-house movie that feels like that one childhood nightmare you can’t shake. The colorful bricks seem to move on their own, controlled by some unseen demon who issues commands in a perverse whisper. Two young siblings are left alone with this menace, and the oddities keep coming: Doors and windows vanish, lights won’t turn on, a hallway flips upside down, toys end up on the ceiling.

Sound like a typical horror flick? Poltergeist meets The Shining? Those movies were influences on Skinamarink, but its director, Kyle Edward Ball, adopted a far more experimental approach. Everything transpires from odd angles, the camera positioned low to the ground or high up at the corner of a room. During the 100-minute film, we see static shots of walls and floors more than we do the actual kids, whose parents’ absence is largely unexplained. Somehow, that elusive lull becomes terrifying—a mood piece in which the next fright always feels milliseconds away.

Skinamarink, which debuted in theaters over the weekend, is a love-it-or-hate-it experience. Some skeptics will give up after 10 or 15 minutes, bored by the lack of conventional imagery. But if you can get on this movie’s wavelength, it’s mesmerizing, sort of like watching a fuzzy old tape from 1995. Either way, Skinamarink captured enough attention to be declared a minor phenomenon after being pirated from a festival’s online platform last fall.

When it leaked on YouTube and other sites, TikTok and Reddit users who discovered Ball’s film gushed about how it was the scariest thing they’d ever seen. Suddenly an art-house indie made in Ball’s childhood home for roughly $15,000 via crowdfunding was a viral internet sensation.

Now, the movie is playing in more than 600 theaters—a large tally for something so untraditional—and getting an exclusive streaming release Feb. 2 on the well-curated horror service Shudder. Ball is already fielding bigger offers for his next project, making the theft of his debut feature both a blessing and a curse.

Ball shot Skinamarink in seven days using equipment borrowed from the Film and Video Arts Society of Alberta, a nonprofit headquartered in Edmonton, Canada, where the 31-year-old and his boyfriend live. Most aspiring horror filmmakers want to make a spooky-house movie, he says, and yet the aesthetic conceit came to Ball before the premise of the story did. Lo-fi productions are his comfort zone, as seen in the YouTube shorts he’s made based on user-submitted nightmares. “Show, don’t tell” is common writerly advice, but Ball's philosophy with Skinamarink was “imply, don’t show.”

“When I was doing my YouTube videos, I didn’t have access to actors,’” Ball tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “Sometimes I would get my friends to maybe act in something, but they weren’t professional actors. I had to find clever ways of working around that. I discovered you can do things like shoot a little bit of someone, like their feet, or even shoot the ceiling, and people will continue to watch and sit through it. After a while, the audience’s imagination starts to fill in the blanks. I think it really worked for this movie because it has this weird sense of loneliness. It felt like we were alone in the house.”

Even if Skinamarink is heavier on atmosphere than plot, a few vital narrative details emerge early on. The parents to 4-year-old Kevin (Lucas Paul) and 6-year-old Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) might be newly separated, and one of the kids was injured during a recent sleepwalking incident. From there, the two-story house they inhabit takes on a mazelike quality.

It’s lit predominately by a flickering TV as Kaylee and Kyle watch an aged VHS copy of Somewhere in Dreamland, a cartoon from 1936 whose score provides loopy ambiance. Time and space seem to bend, and eventually the specter bedeviling their home says ghastly things like, “Kaylee didn’t do what she was told, so I took her mouth away.”

Ball’s 96-page script, which meticulously outlines every shot, was always light on dialogue—but the final cut is even lighter. During the weeklong shoot and four-month edit, in which he applied a graininess meant to evoke ’70s films, Ball stripped lines that filled in details he’d rather leave open-ended, including the monster’s name. Because Skinamarink leaked, Reddit commenters were already puzzling out its ambiguities before it opened in theaters.

“I did want to make a movie where everyone who watches it feels their own personal thing about it and they feel like the movie is just made for them,” Ball says. “I’ve intentionally said I’m not going to say what anything is because what I feel doesn’t matter anymore. It’s not my movie anymore—it’s your movie. In the era of the internet where someone can easily Google an interview, we end up influencing people’s theories and ideas.”

Though his technique is unusual, Ball’s lifelong horror obsession loomed large while making Skinamarink. In addition to Poltergeist and The Shining, he counts The Blair Witch Project, the surrealist Mexican classic The Exterminating Angel, the original Black Christmas, the fuzzy sound design of David Lynch's Eraserhead, and the work of cult master Roger Corman among his antecedents.

The question now that he has found such improbable success is whether he can effectively scale up the way recent horror disciples like Jordan Peele (Get Out), Ari Aster (Hereditary), Rose Glass (Saint Maud), and the trio known as Radio Silence (Ready or Not) have done.

What, for the sake of argument, would Skinamarink look like with a $5 million budget from Blumhouse Productions or A24?

“You could probably make a good movie—you could probably make a great movie—but you couldn’t really make Skinimarink,” Ball said. “And I don’t know how creepy it would be. You could probably make something pretty scary, but I think the big thing with the lo-fi aesthetic is the feeling. It retains its creepiness. I think the bigger the budget, it’s harder to get that creepiness back. There’s exceptions, like The Shining, but that’s a hard thing to extract. My strength is atmosphere, and I need to rely on that.”