I found out about Skinamarink in the best way possible. One night I was flipping through the Shudder queue looking for what’s new when my wife saw it and dared me to put it on.

Until then I’d never heard of Skinamarink, but my wife told me there’d been a lot of postings passed around Facebook calling it the scariest film they had ever seen. 

I’ve played this game before, usually to my disappointment, so of course I hit play. 

For those, like me, who missed the buzz, Skinamarink is the experimental Canadian film by Kyle Edward Ball that blew up on social media after a film festival mistake caused a leaked copy to circulate online. Normally, leaked copies only damage a film’s profit margin, but since Skinamarink was made on a measly $15,000 budget the exact opposite was true. The film’s sudden notoriety gained the attention of IFC Midnight who helped to give it a short theatrical run. Two million dollars later, a film originally made for the festival circuit is now an essential part of the modern horror conversation. But to really understand why it helps to know a little about another phenomenon known as analog horror.

Over the last few years, a growing number of YouTube viewers have stumbled onto various web series that now make up the canon called analog horror. In hindsight, videos feel like a pretty natural progression in the evolution of found footage, taking inspiration from some of the content on creepypasta. I, myself, was introduced to the world of analog horror over a year ago when I clicked a link to a video called “World’s Weirdest Animals” from a series called Gemini Home Entertainment. And down, down the rabbit’s hole I went.

To be honest, I find most analog horror a little too cheap and a tad bit too tedious for my tastes, but occasionally you can come across a few gems. As far as consistency goes, I don’t think anybody has yet beat Kris Straub’s Local 58 TV– and I’m not just saying that because he is credited for popularizing the genre. (Creepypasta fans also know Straub as the creator of “Candle Cove”.) Everybody should check out “Real Sleep”, “Contingency” and “Show for Children”. Straub’s advantage over the many analog horror entries that came after is that he’s not trying to formulate a meta-narrative that gets increasingly silly the further in you delve. (There’s my two-cents.)

So, what exactly is analog horror? 

Analog horror is a relatively new genre that has a considerable fanbase on YouTube. A lot of these entries have the grainy look of recovered archival footage from the V/H/S era. These videos generally start off rather mundane, but slowly warp into something surreal, unexpected and threatening- as though the broadcast was hijacked by an unknown entity with malicious intent. With a lot of analog horror, there is the uneasy feeling that some otherworld conspirator is trying to mess with you.

Over time, Straub’s Local 58 TV videos got imitated by others with more of an interest in world-building and this helped to establish a kind of analog horror formula. Part of the fun with analog horror is that it tries to make the viewer an active participant who must decipher the cryptic horrors taking place. The videos often provide no definitive answers, ensuring that fans will debate online endlessly about differing theories. 

Analog horror is also progressive in the way it scares. The longer a video is on, the weirder it gets. 

If you watch a lot of analog horror, you come to expect a lot of text, even when there doesn’t need to be any. And what’s written in the text is often the creepiest part of videos. 

You can also expect analog horror to include and distort old footage existing within the public domain for their own purposes. 

And they come with a winning price tag. Most analog horror videos were incredibly cheap to make so if you’re good at making them, there is a high potential to profit.

Relatively quickly, what was considered analog horror expanded to include content that went beyond imitating strange archival broadcasts or documentaries. Suddenly, a video diary-type web series like Hi I’m Mary Mary could find itself included in the discussion because it contains many of the analog horror elements. This is also true of my personal favourite analog-inspired video, the 12-minute “My house walkthrough” by Japanese artist PiroPito.

Which brings us back around to Skinamarink, perhaps the most ambitious analog horror-inspired project to date. It intentionally checks off many of the genre’s boxes, even a few it didn’t need to, which has allowed for its inclusion into the analog horror conversation despite it being a non-found footage-type narrative. 

Set in 1995- because that was a time V/H/S was still popular- Skinamarink begins with a four year old boy named Kevin seemingly playing hide and seek at night with an invisible presence. (Yes- I know- this film is pretty much starting in the middle of a Paranormal Activity movie.) Kevin starts a countdown at the top of the stairs and then suddenly goes tumbling down them. 

If you feel that a violent sequence involving harm to a four year old seems like too gruesome a way to start a movie, don’t worry. When Kevin falls, we are pretty much just looking at walls. In fact, most of the footage in Skinamarick is just long static shots of walls, ceilings and floors from angles that match a child’s perspective. 

Wait. What?!

That’s right. I will repeat. Skinamarink‘s one hour and forty minutes consists mostly, but not entirely, of shots showing the walls, ceilings and floors in a very, very haunted house. It is an audacious move that screams in the face of mainstream film goers- but then again, you have to remember that Ball never expected his film to get a wide release in theaters. 

But God be damned if Skinamarick doesn’t go down as the Earserhead of this generation. Ball collected comments from people telling him about their nightmares before attempting to film nightmares of his own and he has used his own unique visual and editing style to create a film that has penetrated some people’s subconscious and unlocked deeply rooted childhood memories. This is a film that captures the idea of childhood fear in a way that has never been done before.

Reading some people’s reactions to Skinamarink has made me very aware that this film did to them something similar to what Lake Mungo did to me; which I personally find amusing because people rarely mention Lake Mungo in horror conversations, but I’ve seen the film suddenly referenced a lot in discussions about Skinamarink. I find it all very validating.

Now back to the plot.

The day after Kevin’s fall, he and his six-year old sister, Kaylee, wake up to find themselves alone in the house, except now the windows are gone and the doors seem to be quickly phasing in and out of reality. They check, but the phone lines also seem to be disconnected. Scared and alone, the children choose to make the living room their new safe space, finding some comfort in a V/H/S tape that has some very old cartoons recorded onto it.

Eventually, the children start to lose their sense of time. Then things start to turn really, really bad. This is a dark film- both in the way it is shot and in content.

That these kids go through Hell kind of makes sense since Ball’s short film “Heck” is literally about a mother and son that are trapped in a house descending into Hell. In fact, the similarities between “Heck” and Skinamarink are so pronounced that, with hindsight, it is obvious the short film was essentially the prototype for the feature-length project.

(Fun fact: Ball actually got permission to shoot Skinamarink in his childhood home. How cool is that?)

One of the advantages Ball’s format has is that it allows him to make an entity that can behave in a truly sadistic manner in a film containing child protagonists. We never see images of the children being physically tortured…well, there is that one jump scare…but other than that, physical harm is always done offscreen. Occasionally the camera will show events directly from the point of view of one of the children, but when it does it’s not at a point where they experience physical harm. The images of physical harm, when not reduced to a blood splatter, are always left up to our imaginations. 

The children being mentally tortured, however, is depicted in spades, especially during those point-of-view scenes. Without question, the experimental nature of Ball’s film allows him to push boundaries. Ball is able to tot with an ingrained accepted societal belief that visual images do more harm in cinema than the accompanying audio stimuli. After all, who’s going to censor a shot of a wall, even when the soundtrack contains a child screaming in pain heard over top of a demon’s horrific wailing? But this also means a lot of storytelling is done through sound. 

Well…sound, subtitles and what are obviously very carefully selected and symbolic scenes from old cartoons.

Not that we never see people in Skinamarink. It’s just that the footage containing a human body part probably accounts for only about eight-minutes of the film’s total runtime. Of course, don’t expect to see many shots of faces. Ball deliberately kept the showing of faces to a minimum to increase our unease. It goes without saying that Skinamarink is a film that thrives on atmosphere.

But when we do see the direct shot of a face, there definitely is an added weight to that scene. 

Of course, nobody but Ball knows for sure what Skinamarink is really about. After watching, I considered the Kevin’s-in-a-coma theory before reading about it online, but later dismissed the theory after deciding that anything that doesn’t account for the mom seems to be missing the mark. I mean, come on!! Where is the mother at the beginning of the movie? Why does Kaylee not want to talk about her? And why does the entity enjoy taking her form? I have my own ideas. Prolonged postpartum depression? Is she dead? Ball says he knows, but for now he isn’t willing to tell.

Is Skinamarinck a modern horror masterpiece? Yes. But it is one that comes with a lot of hate and misunderstood backlash from people who came to see one of the many Internet declared “scariest films ever” only to find its presentation off putting. But naysayers, please hear me out.

I admit, Skinamarick can at times be a bit of a slog. The first time I viewed it, I thought things were starting to drag a bit towards the end. But I pose this question to all of the viewers who actually had the stamina to make it to the end: how many films out there contain this many truly memorable images and segments? There are horrors and images in Skinamarink that will permanently etch themselves into your brain. This isn’t the horror you love immediately after you read “The End”; this is the film you love after it keeps kicking away in your skull for days. So few films manage to accomplish that.

And this is the same feeling people get watching the best entries in analog horror.

I’ll be honest. I do not have particularly high expectations for the next batch of feature-length analog horror films. My understanding is that a film version of Backrooms now has the greenlight. But Ball’s success came because he saw past the confines of analog horror while still managing to capture its essence using an experimental format. He wanted to film a nightmare and certain genre features of analog horror helped him to do that. That Skinamarink ended up being seen by so many eyes is a happy accident created by the unpredictable demands of a fickle Internet community. My guess is the next attempts at creating a feature-length analog horror will fall flat because they will actually be trying to create a feature-length analog horror film. Or worse still, they are going to transplant analog horror ideas onto the found footage format. (In many ways, this process has already begun.) Call me pessimistic, but there is just no scenario where I see any of this sitting well with either the general public or the analog horror fan base.

Truth is I’d bank on the next great analog horror being Ball’s sophomore effort. From what I’ve read, he seems like the kind of person who has a lot of great ideas still left in the tank.