The viral sensation Skinamarink is this generation’s Blair Witch Project

Kyle Edward Ball’s devious, skin-crawling indie horror film SkinamarinkIt is simple, just like the name Ball gave it. The film, which has become notorious via TikTok and word-of-mouth, was shot entirely inside Ball’s childhood home in Edmonton, Alberta. There are only two identifiable characters in the film, but they rarely appear onscreen. Ball fashions his horror, and by extension his “story,” around sensory and atmospheric tricks, using carefully curated camerawork, lighting, sound, and editing. Skinamarink has been met with both praise and skepticism, like so many other great historical horror films — particularly Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s 1999 horror game-changer Blair Witch Project. Ball’s approach to the idea of fear, the meticulous formal movements he uses to generate it, and the polarized audience response all recall Blair WitchAs well.

The song “Skidamarink,” also known as “Skinnamarink,” dates back to the 1910 musical The Echo. Its lyrics are mostly nonsense; each short verse ends with “I love you.” About midway through Skinamarink, the two main characters — Kaylee and Kevin, a very young sister-and-brother pair — tell each other “I love you,” signifying that they’re worried about their situation. Left alone in a dark house where the doors and windows have disappeared, they’ve gotten bored of playing with their toys, watching cartoons, and eating cereal. They’re starting to notice the house is becoming darker and darker, and they want their parents to come back. They hear a childlike, gargled voice calling them.

The ambiguity of the film’s terror, which depends much more on sensation than explicitly scary figures or monsters, grabbed some viewers by the throats. Fans say it’s innovative in the way Ball creates a sense of dread from minimalist elements. Non-fans say it’s slow, trudging, and lacking in scares. All this brings you back Blair Witch Project, which was similarly criticized as “boring” and “not scary” by viewers who bought into the advance hype around the film, then found it wasn’t what they expected from a horror movie.

Some viewers were frustrated and confused by this. Blair Witch’s cinéma vérité approach, with its improvised dialogue, characterization, and camera movements. It wasn’t the first found-footage horror movie, but it revolutionized the technique in American cinema: The ways the camera shakes, rattles, gets dropped, and purposefully obscures objects suggests that the film wasn’t “directed.”

People were so frightened by the approach that Burkittsville police received several calls from people who suspected the Blair Witch videotape to be true. The officers even organized search parties in an effort to track down the actors from the film. The directors use that handheld camera to get viewers’ eyes and minds to play tricks on them. The images begin to move and shapes and shadows start to dance. The movie never looks evil in the face, but it’s designed to make people sure they Definitely There was something in the background.

Skinamarink, The camera remains mostly still. The camera dares you to look into dark hallways and crevices in furniture. One particular hallway or darkened room is the focus of the camera’s attention. (It’s hard to tell which — the house’s spatial geometry is purposefully ambiguous.) This approach was designed to get viewers thinking about what could be hidden just outside their reach. We can’t see it, but what if it can see us?

The presence or absence of objects is a large part of the film’s suspense. The camera is often ground-level or tilted up toward the ceiling, keeping characters’ presence and motions ambiguous. When a door creaks, you don’t know who or what is walking through it. The light will only reveal more dark spaces when it turns on.

Jamie McRae’s cinematography takes Kyle’s or Kaylee’s vantage point a few times, with the camera stumbling around as they try to find their way through the dark, where voices beckon them. At other times, they’re only seen in portions, as feet hanging off the sofa, illuminated by the brilliant shine of the TV, or the back of a head, as one of them stares into the seemingly endless nothingness through a dark doorway. These conscious decisions make the house’s floors and walls look gargantuan. The house’s structure is constantly reconstructed. Anyone can turn into a portal. A door could disappear only to reappear again later. The house may be alive and can strike anywhere.

However Skinamarink is presented in a retro analog fashion, with high grain and saturation meant to imitate exploitation cinema of the ’70s and ’80s, the movie’s inspiration and word-of-mouth reception were both internet-born. Ball ran a YouTube channel where he created short films out of viewers’ retellings of their nightmares. He recently told RogerEbert.com that “from the get-go, the internet has been my co-director.” He turned one of those submissions into the horror short Heck, a clear precursor to Skinamarink.After SkinamarinkTikTok users created their own video warning of how frightening the movie was, and it debuted at 2022 Fantasia Festival. Shudder has stated that #Skinamarink was viewed close to 7,000,000 times on TikTok.

Media and horror have been inextricably linked for centuries. Both Blair Witch Project Skinamarink gained notoriety by going viral on the internet — in Skinamarink’s case, after the entire movie leaked online. These films both use technology to scare. Where is it? Blair Witch ProjectBall utilized retro technology to cipher terror using a handheld digital camera. You can find comfort in both the TV and the malevolence of the TV that is left on during the whole movie. It’s an old analog TV with a VCR, playing retro public-domain cartoons, including the Looney Tunes short “Prest-O Change-O.”

Image: Artisan Entertainment

The metaphor that short offers is clear — the house is in constant metamorphosis, and the way random objects and passages disappear represents the fear of the unknown and of loss of control. The TV’s harsh white light, often silhouetting the kids and their toys, starts to repeat sequences from the cartoons. The TV’s audio cycles and warps. It rings like a toy phone. The seemingly mundane household happenings can seem sinister in the darkness. Anyone who was raised in suburban homes can recall the sounds of creaks or scratches that are louder at night than when it was daylight.

Skinamarink’s production budget was only around $11,000, and Ball takes full advantage of his financial limitations, simplifying the film’s atmospherics and relying on the base elements of cinema. It’s a tour de force of understanding how sound and camera movements on their own, with common objects and within common places, can create staggeringly effective emotive responses. Ball told iHorror, “I would say that in a lot of ways, I’m fairly incompetent, but my big big strength that I’ve always had is atmosphere.”

Horror has always been more open to the imaginative possibilities of cinema than most genres, and it’s often made the most of meager budgets by focusing on mood and aura. For Ball, the limitations on his YouTube channel’s production helped teach him what works in horror, and how to work around not having the budget for actors or effects. “I had to do a lot of tricks as far as implying action, implying presence, POV, to tell a story with no cast,” he told iHorror.

For others, these limitations are not so severe. Skinamarink’s unconventional storytelling are failings, just as Blair Witch Project’s choppy visuals, improvised dialogue, and narrative teasing were failings. However, both films are enjoyable. Here are some great examples of how horror filmmakers can use mood and emotion to create a compelling story that appeals to a broad audience. These movies’ approaches aren’t for everyone, not in a culture that prefers to focus on movies telling the audience things rather than making them feel things.

In either case, SkinamarinkStrong reactions are inevitable. Similar Blair Witch Project in 1999, it doesn’t look anything like the other viral hits of its era, and its ability to conjure fear and dread in the simplest ways is a testament to the ingenuity and creativity that horror cinema offers. We will see if it succeeds. SkinamarinkHas anything ever had the same impact? Blair Witch Project it had on film, both in terms to the number of copycats that were created and its subgenres. Maybe instead it’ll just stand as a reminder that as long as horror directors keep finding new ways to scare their audiences, they’ll keep pushing the genre further.

SkinamarinkOn Jan. 13, the movie debuts at theaters