Kyle Edward Paul began his filmmaking career collecting nightmares.
“I own YouTube channel Where people comment about nightmares they’ve had and I’m going to recreate them.” “Most popular was the same concept: “I’m between 6 and 10 years old. I’m in my house. My parents are either dead or missing, and there’s a risk I have to deal with. I was interested in that because I had a vivid nightmare.” At the time, too. I thought it was amazing how everyone seemed to have this dream, so I wanted to explore that thing. I just ran with it and turned it into a movie.”
Results? “Skinamarink,” a small-budget horror feature that haunted the Internet after several major festival screenings. A clever blend of traditional narrative and art film, “Skinamarink” focuses more on atmosphere and sound design than thick cast or mythology. With visuals that combine David Lynch’s low-key style from “Inland Empire” with a dusty ’70s family movie aesthetic pulled from the attic, it’s a claustrophobic hallucination that blends the scariest ideas from childhood into a dreamy, harrowing experience.
A January theatrical release via IFC Midnight was recently announced, and will find a home on horror streaming service Shudder later in 2023. But so far, the film’s production and release has been a roller coaster for a ball.
The first challenge? A first-time director, Ball needed to raise money, and managed to raise about $15,000, mostly through crowdfunding. From there, he was able to make use of every dollar, from shooting for free in his childhood home in Edmonton, Canada, to borrowing equipment from the Alberta Film and Video Association, a nonprofit cooperative that assists independent filmmakers.
In fact, Ball and his assistant director Joshua Bookhalter — who died during post-production, and to whom the film was dedicated — used the slim budget to their advantage, using creative shots and plotting to suggest movement and terror off-screen and out of sight. The result is a feature consisting of unconventional points of view and angles influenced by the limited view of the world from the eyes of the two central children, and the nameless malevolence that spies on them.
Unlike previous mini-horror films — think 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project” or 2007’s “Paranormal Activity” — “Skinamarink” isn’t found in footage or improvised, with a story hewn together at Liberation Bay. Ball’s entire filmography was scripted in advance, with carefully composed shots to add depth and fear, in an attempt to harness his limitations.
“I joke with people, ‘We made it for the price of a used luxury car,'” Paul says.
The release of “Skinamarink” began when it was accepted into this year’s edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival in Canada. When the premiere was greeted warmly, with a late-night, post-Q&A screening, Paul realized for the first time that audiences might be in touch with his unconventional film.
After that, things got complicated. Paul was excited to see word-of-mouth “Skinamarink” ramping up after five more festival slots, but unfortunately, an art scene during one home showing made the film available to pirate, despite assurances from the platform that it would be safe.
“I think people were under the impression that we didn’t have distribution and were doing us a hacking favor, but we had a plan,” says Paul.
As the pirated version went viral, so did a visceral reaction on social media. For a genre where concepts and word-of-mouth attract more attention than big names and special effects, chatter has piqued interest. Dozens of TikToks have deemed it the scariest movie ever (one video with over 23,000 likes refers to the movie, which “shocks everyone on TikTok”); Reddit posts with frenzied headlines started heated discussions (“Skinamarink has scared me more than any other movie in at least a decade”); And sexy YouTube videos (“Tik Tok Tried To Warn Me About This Movie | Skinamarink”) are popping up every single day. Amazingly, “Skinamarink” sits at number 12 on “Letterboxd”The 50 Best Horror Movies of 2022‘, ahead of well-received box office fares such as ‘The Black Phone’ and ‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’.
Paul was candid when talking about the complications he faced as an artist who received praise from fans who pirated his movie.
“Before hacking, on Twitter when anyone talks about my movie I would like ‘like it,’” he says. “If they did fan art, I would retweet it. It’s so cool when people do fan art! Since I got hacked, it’s been hard, because no filmmaker wants that tsk tsk Someone who says, “Oh my God, I love your movie,” right? At the end of the day, I’m glad someone saw and influenced my film. Obviously, I would have preferred that they see the movie through more legitimate means, because that affects me and the other people who helped with the movie.”
Jane Schoenbrunn, director of the low-budget horror flick We All Go to the World’s Fair, which also attracted a lot of online discussion, agrees that “Skinamarink” is a uniquely scary work of art.
“Probably the only movie experience I’ve ever had that completely captured the unique sense of horror I think a lot of people in my age group felt like kids online, reading scary stories or watching ‘damned’ videos online in the middle of the night, Schoenbrunn says. “After the whole world falls asleep, the frontiers of reality can be a completely terrifying experience alone in your bedroom or with the lights out in your home. ‘Skinamarink’ is a film that adheres firmly to that feeling and tries to create an experience for viewers that destabilizes and fractures reality.”
Samuel Zimmerman, Vice President of Programming at Shudder, explains why the movie was essential to the service that aims to bring members “the scariest, most unique horror movie imaginable.”
“Skinamarink is a defining gem, a living nightmare that represents some of the most exciting and disturbing new work in the genre,” says Zimmerman. “Truly, it’s the best kind of horror movie, a movie like no other, that announces the arrival of a special new filmmaker.”
Next up the ball? He’s currently on two ideas that both seem like a logical extension of “Skinamarink”: one is about the legend of the Pied Piper, and the other is about three strangers who all see the same house in a dream. He plans to write this winter and possibly start filming by summer 2023, and he’s excited to explore more of the darker corners in the genre that has allowed him to get a sound even without a huge budget.
“I think people of more humble means really deserve the chance to make a movie if their idea is good,” he says. “I also think it makes for a better product. If only rich people could make movies, that obviously gets stale after a while. I think having more voices from more parts of the world creates more interesting dialogues, and makes for more interesting films in the long run.” .
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