In my continued exploration of indie horror film on YouTube, I decided that this week I’d take a look at the work of Kyle Edward Ball, who would eventually take what he learned making videos for his channel Bitesized Nightmares and turn it into Skinamarink, a masterclass in mood and minimalist dread. The name of the channel tells you everything you need to know – the films are very short (mostly somewhere between three and six minutes each), and they’re based on nightmares submitted by viewers of the channel. It’s really easy to see the genesis of Skinamarink in these videos, which rely largely on ambient sound, slow tracking shots alternating with long takes, and grainy, blown-out cinematography with stark divisions between light and shadow. Narration and music play more of a role here than they did in Skinamarink, but otherwise it’s really easy to see these shorts as proofs of concept. There are 39 videos in the series (along with related material), so I decided to arbitrarily sample ten videos. If this sounds like your thing, there’s plenty more to watch beyond these selections.
Nightmare 1
This film feels like the thesis for the whole thing – it’s short, with some narration describing the dream, and just a slow tracking shot that ends in a mysterious figure. There aren’t any jump scares or musical stings, just quiet, inexplicable dread that’s maybe undercut a little at the end by…well, it’s not exactly a jump scare, but it’s sort of an unnecessary startle that looks fake enough to break the mood. There are a lot of elements here that will recur through the other videos, and in retrospect this does feel like a filmmaker who is maybe not yet as confident in their tools as they will eventually become.
Nightmare 5: Eyes
The structure of this one is pretty similar to Nightmare 1 - narration sets the scene, and the visuals are mostly just a long tracking shot down a long, dimly lit hallway. But music and sound design do a lot of good work here (it’s worth wearing headphones while you watch these) toward making the scene feel menacing, and, just when you think it’s over, it’s not. It’s not intensely scary, but there’s a nice jolt to it.
Nightmare 9: Two Doors
At this point, I feel like I’m starting to see some growth, like Ball is stretching his legs a little and incorporating some new elements. It opens with some moody exterior shots of a house at dusk, and tells its story by using light and shadow to convey the impression of moving figures. At this point, what’s really coming through is the way nightmares are often inexplicable – you don’t know why things are happening, just that they are, and even if they don’t make a lot of sense logically, the things that are happening have some kind of terrible importance. They may not make sense, but there’s still a feeling of danger.
Nightmare 13: Witch
Here is where I start to really see the inclusion of the garish, blown-out color that characterized much of Skinamarink. This one is about a child in peril and a mysterious long-haired figure, shot in sickly greens from a low angle, as if our point of view is that of someone is hiding under a bed. The limited perspective also ramps up the tension – you can’t see what’s going on, you can’t know what’s going on outside of what little you can see, so anything could happen at any moment. Closing your eyes doesn’t help, because you know the figure is still there and you’re pretty sure something bad is going to happen to the child. But as in all of these, there’s not a lot of closure or exposition.
Nightmare 17: Dinner
This is the most cryptic, and creepiest one of the bunch up to this point – a slow tracking shot on a dollhouse (that appears to be watched by at least one indistinct figure) transitions into an actual house interior, where a figure mostly hidden by shadows gestures for us to come in. A little bit of setup ends in a nice little jab that, if overdone would have been a jump scare, but in this instance just puts a little sting into it before a macabre closing line. It’s closer to more conventional horror than the others, but not to a point that feels overdone or contrived.
Nightmare 20: Distorted
This one is a tableau that makes people sitting and watching television into just one of the creepiest things ever, through a use of distorted audio paired with equally distorted facial expressions. The end result reminds me of something David Lynch might do more than anything else. I don’t know if Ball was getting better over time (I mean, probably) or what, but this one and Nightmare 17 both actually got under my skin a little. It’s also a pretty good showcase for the important of editing and rhythm, since to the extent that there’s a formula, a lot of it comes down to long slow or still shots interrupted by a change in perspective at just the right moment, and timing it for maximum impact really does seem like a delicate, precise thing. Which is, I think, a big part of what makes Skinamarink such a success. It takes the idea of making small things very disturbing to its limits, and I feel like I’m watching Ball really getting comfortable with his tools by this point.
Nightmare 24: Mom
The title sort of made me go “ah, geez,” because nightmares involving a mother are gonna be especially creepy, and this one delivers. Like in Nightmare 17, the narration is an integral part of the experience instead of table-setting, and it’s got a really good closing shot that makes excellent good use of a partially closed door with only darkness beyond it. I never really thought about how scary hands could be until I started watching these shorts.
Nightmare 28: Doll
This one’s impressive if only for the way it manages to take a bunch of things that by themselves aren’t that creepy – some stop-motion of a paper doll being constructed, a close up on a sleeping face, and the sound of children laughing – and combine them in a way that ends up being really unnerving. There isn’t a lot of narration, this one is carried mostly by the imagery, but there’s just a little bit at the end that adds a nice chill without actually explaining anything. It’s almost a cliché that our own imagination is going to come up with much worse things than anyone can show us, but this one strikes me as a pretty good argument for its validity.
Nightmare 32: Cold Hand
This one is a bit slight, but it does a very good job of building a lot of tension through stillness. A faceless figure sitting at the end of a bed in a dimly lit room is already unsettling, but when the shot holds on them for an uncomfortably long time, it’s even moreso. The narration comes in late, and layers in enough detail to make up for visuals that, at this point, feel maybe a little familiar. It also manages to make snoring sort of menacing, which I thought was interesting.
Nightmare 35: Machine
This is easily the most abstract of the bunch. There’s some introductory narration, but the visuals are pretty much all texture and light, with a shot of an outstretched arm and some medicine bottles linking the visuals and the narration. It doesn’t have the tension that the last few did, but it’s oblique enough that you feel like you’re getting a window onto someone’s very private fears. It also plays with the format that’s been established up to this point so that what you will have come to assume is the end gets upended for a shot no less abstract than the rest, that again gets held a little longer than is comfortable. It gives the whole thing a feeling of uncertainty, like any of the “rules” of the format can be broken.
Any of these, by themselves, would just be a nicely spooky morsel, but if you watch a bunch back-to-back, it has the same effect that Skinamarink did – it accumulates, so that even though no one moment is a “scare,” per se, over time the tension builds and builds and builds until you’re sure that whatever releases it is going to just make you scream. Even though for a lot of these I found myself thinking that it was well-done but maybe not that scary, I realized about halfway through that I was sort of looking off to the side of the screen, as if I was afraid of what I’d see if I looked right at it. Like Skinamarink, either you’re on this wavelength or you aren’t, and if you aren’t you’ll probably find a lot of these shorts sort of dull or pointless. But if Skinamarink got under your skin, these will too, for all the same reasons.
