SKINAMARINK — The Internet’s own haunted house

Director Kyle Edward Ball had a nightmare as a child: "I was in my parents’ house, my parents were missing, and there was a monster." Turns out, this is a nightmare a lot of people have had. After honing this craft on his YouTube channel, he finally made his film… and then it leaked online. 

Joined by Ball himself and Dread Central’s editor-in-chief MaryBeth McAndrews, Anna explores how SKINAMARINK became the perfect haunted house movie for the internet age.

Season 6, titled Haunted Homes, explores how haunted house movies have mirrored our relationship with our homes. Each episode visits a horror movie that changed the way we imagine a haunted house, from the crumbling Gothic mansions to white picket fences, what it says about the people who live in the houses and what scares them the most.  

Guest written and hosted by Anna Bogutskaya. Find her book on horror films and feelings, FEEDING THE MONSTER, online and in all good bookshops. You can also listen to her horror film history podcast The Final Girls and subscribe to her movie newsletter Admit One.

THE SUBSTANCE is now showing in theaters across the US, UK, Latin America, Germany, Canada and Netherlands and streaming exclusively on MUBI.

SKINAMARINK is now streaming on MUBI in Latin America.

To watch some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

After listening, check out our piece that explores the visual aesthetics of Skinamarink (2022), "Digital Impressionism: Cinema between Figuration and Abstraction". Read the article here.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode includes child endangerment, windowless rooms, liminal spaces, and spoilers. But it doesn't include me, your regular host Rico Gagliano. For one more episode of this horror themed season, I am handing over the hosting reins to a horror expert. You're in good, terrifying hands with her. Enjoy. When I was a kid, my parents often worked nights. They would double lock the door of the apartment I grew up in. I would stay up late reading Stephen King books because I was an extremely cool child with tons of friends. And when I heard the one, two, three of their keys in the front door and their steps down the hallway that led to my room, I'd pretend to be asleep. One such night, I heard the keys. The one, two, three turns, then steps down the hallway... but no one opened my bedroom door. The steps just stopped. After a minute or ten or maybe an hour? Because what is time when you're a frightened kid? I peeked out. The hallway was dark. The lights were off and the front door, when I checked was still double locked. I remember those steps and that key turning so vividly, but it might have been a dream. Tell me if this sounds familiar, because you might have a story like this. Or you may have had a dream like this. Like Kyle Edward Ball, the director of <i>Skinamarink</i>. I had a nightmare where I was around eight, and in the dream, I'm in my parents house, they're not there and there's a monster, and I have to deal with it. And just like hundreds of other people who would leave him comments on his YouTube channel, Bite Sized Nightmares... People would comment different versions of this exact same dream. And what was also interesting was a lot of them had it around the same age. So there's kind of a part of me that thinks this is a universal human experience, right? Like, I think around that age, you're starting to, in earnest, deal with doing stuff where your parents can't help you. What started off as a vivid nightmare turned into one of the most divisive horror films of recent years, a film that was born out of the internet and became a viral sensation that rivaled <i>The Blair Witch Project</i>. Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI is the streaming service that champions great cinema and on this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. I'm Anna Bogutskaya, I'm a film critic, host of the Final Girls podcast, and the author of the new book,

<i>Feeding the Monster: 3:06

A Deep Dive Into Why We Love Watching Horror Films.</i> And for the last five episodes leading up to Halloween, that's today I've been guest hosting this season of the show. It's called 'Haunted Homes' and in it, I've been telling the stories behind some of the most terrifying and impactful haunted house movies ever made. Your regular host, Rico Gagliano will be back with a new season in November. I know you've missed him, but today I'm closing out the season with arguably the haunted house film most relevant to our current times. I spoke to <i>Skinamarink</i> director Kyle Edward Ball and Dread Central's editor in chief and internet horror expert Mary Beth McAndrews about how this experimental Canadian horror flick managed to throw the entire internet off balance and in the process brought the haunted house movie into the internet age. It all started with <i>Titanic</i>.<i>Is there anyone there?</i><i>Yes. What do you see?</i><i>- Iceberg right ahead.- Thank you.</i> My parents took me to <i>Titanic</i>. I loved it, and my mother explained to me what a director does. And she also explained to me that James Cameron was Canadian, like me. So she kind of put that in my head, too, of, oh, he was a Canadian guy who made it in Hollywood. And you can do that too, if you want. Kyle's parents also showed him great horror films, along with Canadian kids horror classics like<i>Goosebumps</i> and<i>Are You Afraid of the Dark?</i> I would say it probably was a combination of <i>Goosebumps</i>, Hitchcock and <i>The Shining</i>. And then once those were set, then I really leaned into it and haven't really stopped. He discovered the horror section at the video store, all of which planted a seed. With horror you can kind of go through the roof and experiment in a way that you can't necessarily with other genres as easily. You can always kind of reinvent the wheel, both as a viewer and as a creator or a filmmaker. After he finished film school, Kyle was working in a video store. It was a stable income, but not the career he was dreaming of. The year was 2014. Horror was entering its...'elevated' era. Films like <i>It Follows</i>, <i>The Babadook</i>,<i>The Witch</i> and<i>A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night</i> were getting critical acclaim and creating a new modern language for horror. And a three minute horror short directed, written, shot, edited and scored by a Swedish man called David F Sandberg starring his wife was going viral. At this point, listener, I'd encourage you to pause this, go watch <i>Lights Out</i> and resist the urge to block me after you've screamed. A woman gets ready to go to bed, but when she turns off the lights, she sees a creepy looking figure in her dark corridor. Dark corridors, again. The short, which eventually got turned into a full feature film, by the way, signalled to Kyle a new way of getting noticed in Hollywood. After that, there was kind of an explosion of viral horror shorts, right? Like, that's that's your way in. Do a viral horror short. Easy, right. And I did... I'd written down a script for an idea of a viral horror short I had. I filmed it, I edited it, it was terrible. I had posted it to a YouTube channel. No one liked it. I didn't like it. The people who were in it didn't like it. My friends and family pretended to like it. It was terrible. And the reason it didn't work was because I had made something that I thought others would like, instead of something that I wanted to make. The failure of this short was depressing. So after that I figured, okay, let's try one more thing. Kyle's idea was, what if he filmed a nightmare? A vivid nightmare I had that I still remember from when I was eight years old. That short called simply <i>Nightmare One</i> is still online. It begins with Kyle's voice introducing the premise.<i>I think I was eight, around eight years old</i><i>seven, or eight, or so.</i><i>And the lights are off</i><i>and I'm watching television.</i> Before fading in on the static on an old timey television set in a living room. He films the stairs, the door, and the figure.<i>Someone was on the loose and this person was dangerous.</i> I remember filming that, putting it on YouTube, and I remember explicitly too, I sent it to my friends and family, and the way they responded to it was different than other stuff I had done. I could kind of read between the lines that they were not having to pretend to be positive about it. And if his nightmare could be the source of ideas for horror shorts, why not other peoples? And so from there, people like, started to comment nightmares they've had. And I had a lot of fun having my own little sandbox of recreating them. That became <i>Bite Sized Nightmares</i>, the YouTube channel where Kyle recreated the nightmares of commenters. 39 of them, to be exact. And as he was doing it, he was finding his style. I started to kind of, in so many ways, go back to my feelings of when I discovered experimental cinema. So Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage and underground cinema and kind of my early feelings of, "Oh, when I grow up, I'm going to be Kenneth Anger. I'm going to be'spooky' John Waters, right? And after doing that for a couple years, I figured, okay, I've played in the sandbox enough. It's time to go kind of do it. It was time to make a film. Originally, the decision was to jump from, okay, so I want to do a feature, I don't know if I should jump into that. Let's do an in-between. Make a proof of concept short. That became the 30 minute film titled <i>Heck</i> with the simple yet chilling logline. A little kid wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of his mom's television blaring. The film, again still available online and which you should watch with headphones on for maximum spookiness, jumps through time. It counts down the time that passes in ominous subtitles on the screen. One sleep, five sleeps, 56 sleeps, 314 sleeps, and so on. A big thing for me was I wanted to do something that was kind of its own thing. I wanted to do something that, you know, if I never get a feature done, I can be at least proud of this, right?<i>Heck</i> is not <i>Skinamarink</i> and <i>Skinamarink</i> is not <i>Heck</i>. But the short film, which played at a single film festival in 2020, unquestionably holds the DNA of the film that would truly launch Kyle's filmmaking career. After the YouTube videos and the proof of concept short, it was time for <i>Skinamarink</i> to emerge. Once again, Kyle asked the internet for help. Through a crowdfunding campaign, his team raised about CA$8,500 of the film's CA$15,000 budget, and they filmed in Kyle's parents house in Edmonton. The house I grew up in that also my parents still live in. This was a practical and an emotional decision. I have access to this location. It's a good location. When I'm writing it, I don't need to think about the floor plan. I have the floor plan like the back of my hand. I have emotions and feelings attached to different parts of the house, and also my parents were amicable to me doing this. With a small budget and a tiny team, they had to get creative. Big portions of the film were lit by an old television set. And what did that meager budget actually produce? Well, how to describe <i>Skinamarink</i> without getting too esoteric? I'll pass this one to Mary Beth McAndrews, Editor in Chief of horror site Dreadcentral. To describe <i>Skinamarink</i> is really difficult, but I think the first word for me is hellish. It's a liminal nightmare that plucks at some kind of subconscious fear that's really hard to pinpoint, but when you watch it, you understand that fear. Skinnamarink starts with two children, four year old Kevin and six year old Kaylee. Kevin sleepwalks and has some sort of accident. His parents take him to the hospital and bring him back and after that they disappear. We don't really see parents at all. This is really like <i>The Lost Boys</i>. Then the doors start to disappear. Then the windows, after that the bathroom. You just start feeling like, what-- Does my house exist still or is disappearing? Disembodied voices instruct the children to do terrible things. Until Kaylee also disappears and Kevin is left alone. Or so he thinks. In playing so much with kids toys, with kids innocence, with their kind of naiveté. It makes this feel so much more upsetting and terrifying because again it taps into that feeling when you were a kid, if you woke up in the middle of the night and you walked down the dark hallway and you don't know what's going on, and you're scared to go into your parent's room because it's pitch black. You really are able to transport the viewer into that subconscious headspace of not knowing where you were, but knowing it was-- you wanted to go to your parents room and find them for safety. But the problem here is the parents that are there don't have mouths or faces.<i>What?</i> The aesthetic is very dark and blue. If we want to get like brass tacks, bound down to it, it is the color of 3 AM.<i>Two...</i><i>Three...</i> When you wake up, you look at your phone,

it's 3: 14:25

00 and it's not quite morning. It's not quite night. And Ball makes this entire house feel that color and feel like that time. And underneath the entire film, a fuzzy soundscape. Like the static of a television someone forgot to turn off. Especially when you wake up at 3 AM when you're a kid and you walk into your parents bedroom and their TV is on. But maybe it's static, or it's an old infomercial and it's the glow of the TV on the ceiling, and it's that blue light, and it's that weird time where everyone's asleep, but you're awake, but you're not sure if you are awake. And somehow Kyle captures that experience so perfectly in this movie that it's terrifying because it feels like such a personal experience, but it's also very universal. I think that's what makes it so scary. It made me think of walking down that dark corridor to check if my parents were really there, or if I was still alone. If you are catching the vibe of<i>Skinamarink</i>, which not everyone does, you really get under your skin about how children are these cosmic pawns, in a way. And it's so chilling, but so impressive in terms of what Ball is able to create. Critics of the film said that nothing happens and they're sort of right. But fans, including myself, were fully drawn into its nightmarish vision. The kids are barely on screen. We don't see them a lot. We just hear their little voices and kind of hear what they're going through. But we don't really see them either. So there's a disconnect even further from them as characters because you don't really see them. And if you see them, it's the backs of their heads. And if it's their faces, they don't have a face anymore. This was a technique that Kyle perfected while making no budget horror shorts for his YouTube channel. I couldn't just pull professional actors out of the air, right? I would usually have to either I would have to act in it, or a friend or family member with no acting experience, and also who I didn't want to impose on, and were nice enough to help me with my little YouTube videos, would be on screen. So the problem is, if you keep reusing actors, it ruins some of the illusion. So a big part was simply finding creative ways of not showing the face. And over time, I had kind of fell in love with that concept. Again, it was coming back to my very naive childhood idea of when my mother told me what a director was, and I thought about all the fame that actors got, and I thought, well, that's not fair. The directors should be the star. And because the film is shrouded in both a hazy mystery of what we can actually see on screen and the behind the scenes myth, fans have started creating all sorts of explanation for what actually happens in <i>Skinamarink</i>. So my favorite, and the one that I ascribe to is that there is an entity that has just chosen these kids, and it's just fucking with them and just torturing them.<i>Your father...</i> We get to points in this movie where there is blood and screaming. We don't know exactly what's happening, but something is bad is happening to a child, which is such a taboo in media. Children can't get hurt. But then <i>Skinamarink</i> says, but what if two children are hurt for an entire film? Other theories include the little boy at the beginning has a concussion, and this is what he, how he is seeing the world through his concussed state. But Kyle has refused to answer the theories. I haven't published the script for a couple reasons. The main reason being there's a handful of things in the script that kind of give away the ghost, and I want to keep it secret. Shudder had requested a copy of the script and I did send it to them, but there's a few lines in the script that I literally redacted and made a note, like redact and put a date like it was a CIA document or something. I'm so pretentious. But I said, no, that dies with me and the crew. Whatever is happening in the house in <i>Skinamarink</i> is up to you. And that in my book makes it more terrifying. Because it allows Kevin and Kaylee's house, which is also Kyle Edward Ball's childhood home, to become your parents house, the site of your nightmares. This visual and aural nightmare fuzz was highly crafted. That's literally how I wrote it. So they'll be in the script. We are in the living room. We hear Kaylee and Kevin step into the room and rustle blankets. They are not on screen. I literally wrote the way you see the movie on the page. He used very precise language to describe the shots, but it also needed to tap into an intangible feeling that came from a vague memory of a Betamax video cassette he'd once watched. So when I was little, my parents had taped on Betamax <i>Alice in Wonderland</i> for me and my sister to watch. Then someone broke into her house and stole her Betamax player, and we could never watch it, right? My parents moved to VHS, and tantalizingly, that Betamax tape sat in our living room. I had particular feelings and memories attached to <i>Alice in Wonderland</i>, and rewatching as an adult on digital had not been replicated. So let's fast forward. After the movie comes out there's a <i>Skinamarink</i> tape I get a VHS player, I start collecting tapes again. I find a 1980s print on VHS of <i>Alice in Wonderland</i>. It's so old there's no trailers at the beginning. It just goes into the movie. I'm watching and I noticed something. This version of it, the blacks are darker, you lose details in the shading of it. And on top of that, this old VHS version this is before a little bit of digital cleaning up. There's like stuff in the film print of it. There's like dust on the celluloid and stuff. And I'm looking at the black and I'm looking at the shading and I'm looking at this stoned and I'm like... It's in the dark, it's in the details, this was a different movie when I was a child because it looked different. It felt different. This is what it is, right? You can have more or less an identical movie, but because of how it's presented, it has a different feeling, a different emotion. This weird 3 AM feeling of a memory of a movie you watched as a kid and freaked you out is exactly what <i>Skinamarink</i> taps into. I was always kind of obsessed with how older movies look and sound different, and how movies from different years, different countries, different places, different film stocks have a different feeling that is a part of the movie, and that is a part of how it expresses and makes you feel. So <i>Skinamarink</i> was finished and this one was not going on YouTube. The goal and the dream was to get it in theaters. We had applied to a few film festivals, and I had applied to the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, which is like, it's like the con of weird. It's called a genre festival. They got into Fantasia. I sat in the back with my friends and I watched, and when the jump scares happened, people jumped and they were reacting to how I hoped they would react. And I'm like, it's happening, it's happening. And then more festivals, and slowly the buzz was building. First on specialist horror sites like Dread Central. This is the kind of movie that could have so easily never been discovered. I was one of the very lucky people that was able to see <i>Skinamarink</i> at Fantasia when it premiered in, I believe, 2022. I watched <i>Skinamarink</i> in the pitch black on my computer screen with my noise canceling headphones, and I was almost like, not half asleep, but was lulled into this trance to when there is a point when a character says...<i>Wake up!</i> And I almost peed my pants. Then chatter started online. People started reviewing it and talking about it, and it was hitting festivals. People started talking about it and it wasn't just critics, it was people online like Redditors, Twitter users started hearing about it. It got picked up by specialist streamer Shudder for distribution. But... What really made it take off was when we played at a European film festival that had an online portion and it got leaked. Nothing ruins a distribution deal like a pirating situation. People talk about the infamous Sundance premiere of <i>The Blair Witch Project</i>. I was hoping we had something like that. I like to think maybe we did. Maybe we had something that people will talk about years from now. Stay with me to hear the really scary part. What happened after Kyle's first film, his big break, ended up on Pirate Bay. MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theaters. Movies from any country, made by legendary auteurs and brilliant first timers. We've always got something new for you to discover and to help pick out some treasures from the MUBIverse is regular MUBI Podcast host Rico Gagliano.- Here I am, back.- What are you... what are you bringing to me today? Well, first I'm just, I'm back here for one last time. I'm kind of sad that this is the last episode that you're hosting, and not just because, you know, it gave me a nice vacation. You're doing a great job. So thanks. Thank you. So what's coming up in the MUBIverse? What can we stream? Well, I think anybody listening to this season is probably going to be pretty excited to learn that October 31st, Halloween on mubi.com, we are going to debut the streaming release of <i>The Substance</i>, the Coralie Fargeat juggernaut body horror craziness, starring Demi Moore as an aging starlet who comes upon a mystery drug that allows her to give birth, almost literally, to a younger version of herself. You've probably heard all of your friends talking about it. Love it or hate it, you have to see it. So check that out.- It's at mubi.com.- It is unmissable. And if any single film is advertising a really solid skincare routine, to avoid future problems, it's <i>The Substance</i>. I guess you could read it that way. I'm running straight back to my moisturizer after seeing<i>The Substance</i> for a second time. Great. You're one of a kind, Anna. And also as a second recommendation, given that it's my last episode guest hosting this podcast, and also it's been the subject of this last episode<i>Skinamarink</i> is streaming on MUBI throughout Latin America. So if you've listened to this episode but you've not seen <i>Skinamarink</i> yet- you can discover it there.- Yes. And as always, you can find the links that you need and where to watch each film in different territories in the show notes of this episode. So let's get back and wrap up this episode and this season. Nice. Imagine you make a movie, you rally your friends, your parents, you crowdfund, and you get it made. And then, oh my God, you get it into the biggest horror festival in the world. You get a distributor, then you find it online... by scrolling through your socials. I was searching the name of the movie on Twitter like an egomaniac, and I saw a account that had listed it like <i>Skinamarink</i>.WEBRIP.H624 and I'm like, what's that about? And I clicked on it and I'm like, this is the movie. So I contacted the film festival, I contacted the distributor. I'm like, this happened, we need we need to do something. And then I saw the movie blow up and blow up.<i>Skinamarink</i> was going viral in a big way. People were sharing it online in snippets and the entire thing. People started sending me fan art and stuff, right? And I couldn't even, I thought, I can't respond to this because I'm giving tacit approval of this. It was really, really, really cool and bizarre to see all of these memes popping up from <i>Skinamarink</i> like a movie that just is the most like you would think, the most inaccessible thing. Looking back on it, it's like Kyle, you should have known in the moment that that was something amazing. I was having a meltdown when I should have been celebrating. On Reddit, on TikTok, on Twitter, people were sharing short clips of the film, calling it the scariest movie ever. The press dubbed it the TikTok generation's <i>Blair Witch Project</i>. A situation like this would usually ruin a film's commercial potential. In <i>Skinamarink</i>'s case, it helped it. All of a sudden people were saying how much they love <i>Skinamarink</i>, how they couldn't wait to see it in a theater. And I think that was one of the things that was really interesting for me to see, is seeing users who had pirated the film, but then were saying, I can't wait to see this in a theater, if it comes to a theater. And this little film, made for CA$15,000 was released in 800 cinemas.<i>Skinamarink</i> came out in theaters in January of 2023, when there was a planned release already slated for later in that year. But they pushed everything up very fast because of how it leaked. What got us the Shudder deal was Fantasia. It was not the viral leak. Now, with that being said, what maybe got us 800 cinemas on Martin Luther King weekend may have been the viral leak. It grossed almost $1 million that weekend alone. That's over 100 times its budget. We talk about movies like <i>Alien Romulus</i>,<i>Trap</i>, making like tens of millions, but I mean a little movie like <i>Skinamarink</i> making $1 million at the box office is so crucial to see that people want to watch weird stuff like this, even if it's divisive. This was such an incredible moment for film and for independent horror film and what people want from independent horror film, particularly in the 2020s. Really, to me, it speaks so much about what audiences want from the horror genre now. The people who watch the movie and fall in love with it, and sent me fan art and made it so much bigger than it was. I have no ill will to them. They just found a movie and watched it, right? How many times when I was a teenager, I just found a movie and watched it and fell in love with it, right? People were freaked out online by it, and they took that creepy feeling all the way to the cinema. It was so interesting to see a couple of little tweets about <i>Skinamarink</i> and talking about it. And then all of a sudden on Reddit, people were like, there's this weird liminal horror thing happening. Because liminal horror is not necessarily new. Analogue horror is not necessarily new. It's existed on YouTube for a while.<i>Skinamarink</i> was one of the first theatrically released films from this online-bred genre known as analogue horror. It tapped into the wave of experimental, lo-fi horror that was made for, and sort of by, the internet. A lot of analogue horror in the form that I'm discussing exists on YouTube. Almost always these videos that look like either PowerPoint presentations or very, very old school VHS footage.<i>Tape one unidentified disease. Researcher, Dr Julia Williams.</i>

<i>Station: 31:19

Cate's Crossing Health Unit. Date: the 8th of August, 1988.</i> That's from the YouTube series<i>The Tangi Virus</i>, which tells the story of a contagion through archival footage. And I say PowerPoint presentations not to be derogatory, because the format of analogue horror as it exists on YouTube is very simple, but it means it's very accessible for all. Like any filmmaker with any resources to create something and can create something scary, and it's usually an exercise in playing with static images and playing with text on screen and in playing with how to create a horror story very simply, but very effectively.<i>Sample two, near Cate's Crossing.</i> Class is the silent player in the story. Because while film festivals are very exclusive places that few can access. The internet isn't, and neither is horror. Horror from the get go, since early horror and in so many ways, has always been a way for the working class to break into Hollywood. Analogue horror makes filmmaking even more accessible by tapping into the power of lo-fi filmmaking and our memories of old, everyday technology. It never feels new. It feels like you're unearthing something from the past. So there is this nostalgia thing with analogue horror, and I think one, it comes from the ability to make things look rough so you can kind of make up for if something doesn't look perfect or polished. And then there's that term that Mary Beth brought up earlier, liminal. It comes up a lot in conversations around <i>Skinamarink</i>, and it means something very specific when we're talking about internet horror. Liminality is the in-between space. It's disorienting and ambiguous. It's both real and unreal, and nowhere feels more in-between than the internet itself. I think online is the ultimate liminal experience. You know, like you are online posting and you know it's you, but all the people in your little phone like, who are these people? If you're confused, that's about right. On the internet, the idea of liminal spaces became huge, especially during the pandemic. They are those in-between spaces, like airport lounges, hallways, empty streets. Spaces we pass through on our way to somewhere else. Spaces that spend a lot of time empty, that feel haunted. And I think with films like <i>Skinamarink</i> and these pieces of analogue horror are bringing that awareness of the liminality that we are all currently existing in constantly to the forefront of our brains. And that's what scares us. I think it brings an awareness to something that we try so hard to ignore. We want so badly to feel real, and these pieces of media kind of say, you're not real, actually, and I love that. But I think that's why they're so scary, especially in such a tumultuous era of literally everything. You know? Given what the entire world was experiencing during the pandemic, it's unsurprising that analogue horror was experiencing a boom. Nothing felt real. So these weird little videos totally embraced the strangeness of a world frozen by a global pandemic. In fact, the same year <i>Skinamarink</i> was hitting cinemas and the internet, another analogue horror short was going viral.<i>- Sound, camera.- Rolling.</i><i>All right. And action.</i> In 2022 a 17 year old would make a horror short that has been seen 62 million times, as of today.- Yeah.- Yeah. Whoa! By the time this episode airs, it will probably have gone up by another couple million. And I was just looking for things to do. I was doing little tests here and there. Just sort of... That's Kane Parsons, also known as Kane Pixels during his first in-person interview ever on the Anthony Padilla Podcast. Stumbling around until I found something and I came across it was a really simple beginning, really. I just came across one of The Backrooms images again. I'm very obsessed with the look and feel of spaces, especially hostile spaces, just ones that feel like they don't really make sense. What Kane did was turn a viral image of a hostile space into a short film. The image is called The Backrooms. It's a JPEG that appeared anonymously on an online forum around 2019, and it's the ultimate liminal space, or at least the most well known one. You may know this image already, and if you want to ruin your day, I suggest you Google it. It's a picture of an empty office complex, illuminated by a sickly yellow fluorescent light. Something is off. The corridor is never ending. The columns don't quite touch the ground, and even though no one's there, you can't quite be sure. Kane Parsons used this image as a jumping off point to create his film, also called <i>The Backrooms</i>, eventually expanding it into a whole horror series. For my money, the internet right now is where experimental horror lives and probably will continue to live. The best part of analogue horror is getting lost on YouTube and falling into a liminal space of finding it. It just-- let the liminal gods guide you through the YouTube algorithm to find some weird stuff. Because there is so much creativity online of filmmakers, of people who aren't even, who don't even consider themselves filmmakers, but just want to make something weird. That sense of weirdness permeates every frame of <i>Skinamarink</i>, a movie that doesn't need a big effects budget to create a totally unique atmosphere of fear and dread. It doesn't even need to move the camera that much. This isn't about cutting to action. Moving the camera. A dynamic camera that follows chaos. This is a static, still, assured, confident camera that just is not afraid to sit and watch.<i>Skinamarink</i> lets you feel the danger and observe the surroundings. And also you get to know the surroundings and know the house. So when something changes, you are very aware of it and you know that something is wrong. It's a movie that creates a new kind of haunted house. One for a world fractured by a global pandemic. We will always be scared of our house being invaded and of if something coming to destroy it. But what does that look like in mean in 2022/2023 when this came out, and to me, the suburban house that is not being necessarily attacked by a monster or a ghost, but rather something unknowable is so speaking to our current time. Speaking of the liminal space we all live in about, like what's going to happen next in this terrifying world where everything seems to be falling apart. It looks like an empty house you can't get out of. That might be haunted, or just maybe it's completely empty and you're in there alone forever. And that's it for the MUBI Podcast for this week. In fact, that's it for this series of haunted house stories. It's been my honor to tour you through these bedeviled movie homes. In just a couple of weeks, your regular host, Rico Gagliano will be back with a brand new season of the MUBI Podcast. I predict it will be a huge hit, which is ironic because it's all about total flops. Most films that are hits are kind of calculated to make exactly the amount of money that they make. Not very instructive, not that interesting to write about or to read about, but the ones that are calculated to do a certain number and then pitifully fail. Those films really interest me. It's a whole season about really good movies with really bad box office, with guests like legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins and many more. Follow us so you don't miss it. Until then, this episode of the MUBI Podcast was hosted and written by me, Anna Bogutskaya Ciara McEniff is our producer. Christian Coons is our editor. Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick. Thanks this week to the entire MUBI team for helping shepherd this spooky special season out of the void and into your podcast feeds. If you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen, even if it's from the bowels of the internet. And if you've got questions, comments, or just want to tell me about your eight year old self's nightmare that you still can't shake, email it to us at podcast@mubi.com. This show is executive produced by Rico Gagliano, Jon Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. And of course, to watch the best in cinema, including some of the films we mentioned on this very podcast, subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com. Thanks for listening. Stay out of the backrooms.