Interview With Filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball For SKINAMARINK

Have you ever sat in your house at night and wondered what sort of ominous presence could be lurking in the shadows, completely unseen by you? If you know that spine-tingling sensation, then you might have just a fraction of a sense of what Skinamarink, the feature-length debut from filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball, is all about. Shot with four actors over the course of a week in his childhood home, Skinamarink has now been granted a theatrical release, which is to be followed by a streaming release on Shudder. I sat down with the filmmaker to discuss designing the film, working with child actors, the current state of the horror movie landscape, and more!

This interview has been edited for clarity. 

Jake Tropila with Film Inquiry: First, I’d just like to say congratulations, not just on the distribution, but for making one of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen. How’s everything going with the reaction to Skinamarink?

Kyle Edward Ball: Thank you, it’s been a roller coaster, but I love a good roller coaster.

This film is not like anything I’ve seen in recent memory. I’d like to take your temperature on the current horror landscape: anything you’ve seen that you’re dissatisfied or not pleased with, or any thoughts you’d like to share on the state of horror cinema now?

Kyle Edward Ball: I think we’re in a horror renaissance right now, which really started with The Babadook and It Follows and has just kept going. Horror is the most interesting genre because it keeps having to reinvent itself. Even when you look at the “down eras” of horror, let’s say the early 90s, it was a relatively short time. Everything ended in the 80s, but then started right up again with Scream. So, it’s very rare in horror where there isn’t something amazing or interesting happening. I saw Nope this summer and loved it. Obviously, it’s a very different film than I could ever do, which is part of why I loved it so much, because I’m always impressed by a movie that I could not even approach. As far as stuff that’s dissatisfied me, yes, there is stuff in horror movies that I roll my eyes at, but I don’t want to say any examples. I don’t like saying anything mean about other filmmakers.

I totally get that. You’ve made a lot of shorts on YouTube, including your previous short film Heck, which is great. Was the original plan to turn that into a feature?

Kyle Edward Ball: Yeah, so Heck was always designed to be a proof of concept for a feature. I went in with an idea that the feature would be different, but here’s a story I could work into a proof of concept that could almost stand alone. After making that, I’ll have maybe figured out more of what I wanted to do with the feature, what I don’t want to do with the feature, what I want to do with the look, and what I don’t want to do with the look. So, on top of being a proof of concept for others, it was another experiment for myself. After I did Heck, I thought the experiment worked and I had proved my thesis to myself, so I got to work on writing a script, and then development and pre-production began. I don’t know if I would have been able to do that if I did not have a huge community of people around me to help me, because it really does take a village to make a movie, and when you’re a small filmmaker you need all the help you can get.

Going through the stages of making a movie, do you have a favorite aspect of filmmaking?

Kyle Edward Ball: That’s a tough one. It’s different every time. There were parts of writing the script where I felt so on (snaps fingers), but that may have been because…okay, I wasn’t drinking a lot when I was writing it. Like, I wasn’t doing Sam Peckinpah levels of drinking, but I’d have one vodka and type away, which is why going to the bathroom features weirdly heavily in the movie, I think it was subconscious (laughs). I didn’t notice that till after, I thought “Maybe this was because I’m drinking vodka with lime the whole time.” Pre-production and development I know are always portrayed as the less glamorous portion of making stuff, but they can also be incredibly endearing. When I was doing the crowdfund, I never thought my friends would donate all that money to me, and my friends aren’t rich, either. They would just give me money, or even people from film school who I hadn’t talked to in forever were donating money, so that felt incredible too. All these other people, who I didn’t know how they felt about me, wanted to see me make something. Shooting is supposed to be the crazy part, but in many weird ways filming it was the most Zen part of it all. We were shooting in darkened house with the windows covered, and most of the time we weren’t recording sound. It felt like there were these two giant parties with the Zen part in the middle. Usually, it’s the other way around. And then editing was stressful for any number of reasons. Once I had a rough cut, I’d send it to people to critique and provide feedback, and getting people provide feedback on a feature can be like pulling teeth sometimes. And even if they came back with feedback, I would get in my head and say “Are they just being nice?” Or, the inverse, “Are they being too harsh because they want to strong arm any arguments against the movie?” I love the whole journey, I don’t know if I ever want to do a movie where I just direct it. Every movie I want to write, direct, and edit. In film school, we were always told the director should never edit their movie because they’re too biased. I found that’s the case with a lot of directors, but we’re making movies, we’re not making bumpers for cars, there’s no rules to it, right? I think I’m pretty good at editing my own movies, and I’ll keep doing the whole process going forward.

I’m glad you mentioned editing because I’m most fascinated by the post production process, especially in regards to the soundscape. Could you talk about how you built that out?

Kyle Edward Ball: From the get-go, I wanted it to not just look like an old movie, but sound like one, too. The only audio in the movie that was actually recorded on set was the ADR for the actors, which was not recorded while we were shooting the actors, and the scene where someone opens a closet door. The rest was put in after the fact. When I went to do sound, I had stumbled upon a gold mine of a public domain library with old sound effects from the 50s to 60s, and a lot of it was perfect because it had that “old” feeling to it. Once I had all my sound set up, it still wasn’t quite sounding “old” enough, so I spoke with my friend Tom, who’s an audio guy, on how to get it to sound “old”. It turns out it has a lot to do with low-passing it and just muffling it a little bit. I played with the sound throughout, but in each individual clip I had to do different levels. I was sound engineer, editor, color grader, and special effects all in one, and it was such an involved process. I would say sound was the funnest part because I like doing it more, but also when you’re doing sound you’re less likely to crash your computer because it requires less memory. But even then, when I sent the rough cut to someone to critique, he said it looked great but found the dialogue to be way too low and that I had to bring it up. And I asked “Are you sure it’s not that the whole thing’s low?” And he said “No, I heard all the other sounds fine, you gotta go in and bring up the dialogue.” So, I had to go in and painstakingly find all the dialogue and amp it up, but even then if you bring it up then it can peak and mess up other things.

Is that where the decision to add subtitles came in?

Kyle Edward Ball: No, that was in the original script, actually. From the original script, I wanted to play with that, partially because of influences from analog horror, partially because I thought it could be another thing to experiment with. I also put them in the script because while writing I knew I might have limited time with these kid actors, and kids don’t always enunciate the best, so it would be a good parachute. And that turned out to be the case, because there are a handful of scenes in the movie where I didn’t originally have the subtitles that I did in the script, but not that many. Most of the parts that had subtitles in the movie, they were in the script. And that was another thing you can play with, I could make the subtitles look a little worn and old, too. There’s a part where it’s not a subtitle, it’s a title saying something, I don’t want to spoil what it is, but for the last frame of it I flipped it upside down, because why not? It’s just another thing to play with.

You mentioned the children. What were the two young actors’ understanding of the film they were making?

Kyle Edward Ball: I had to be careful, because a long time ago I heard Spielberg say that kids know when they’re being talked down to. I didn’t want to talk down to them, but I didn’t want to give them the full picture of what the movie was because I had such limited time with them. The first shot of the movie is the two kids coming out of their room, walking into the hallway, interacting, and then going into their dad’s room. That was actually the first scene we shot, and while I was directing them I was so nervous my hands were shaking. Before that I told them what was basically the broad strokes of the movie: “You two are brother and sister, you’re in a house, there’s a monster, at some point the monster makes all the windows and doors disappear,” and that was basically it. Even when I was telling them that, I was shaking, and when I was directing them for the first shot, I was still shaking. So I say “Action!” and they did the scene perfectly, and I yell “Cut!” and thought “Oh, that was easy, I don’t know why I psyched myself up for this.” Kids are quite good at stuff if you give them time and space to do it. Once we got the first shot in the can, I thought this was going to be a breeze, and it really was. There were a handful of parts that were difficult, but it really was not that hard. Kids are game if you treat them with respect, and I also made the set kid-friendly. I had four hours with them, if that, and if they refused or there were a hefty amount of potty breaks, for all I know these kids were going to have artistic differences with me. But if you just plan for it ahead of time, it’ll work, and it did. We wrapped that day on time. It was amazing.

Have they seen the finished film?

Kyle Edward Ball: No. The two adult actors have seen the movie. The little girl Dali, who plays Kaylee, she’s really excited for it. She’s already getting into horror movies, because her mom loves horror movies too. Like, she’s seen Carrie (laughs). I know that sounds odd, but I saw The Shining when I was about her age, and I turned out okay. She’s really excited to see the movie, she’s going to see it tomorrow when it plays in Edmonton. And I believe Lucas, the boy who plays Kevin, is also going to see it, but he’s two years younger than her, and I think his experience with the movie was completely different. One day, he got voluntold to be in a movie, and his payment was a giant bag of gluten-free candy. It had to be gluten-free because the girl playing Kaylee can’t have gluten, but he was happy with that. Outside of that, I don’t think he really cares at all about the movie, because he’s like six or seven, and the movie is not about Minecraft or Transformers (laughs). It doesn’t enter his world at all, I think he’s blissfully ignorant of what’s going on in the film, but his dad’s really excited about it, because his dad plays the dad in the movie. I think he’ll eventually grow to appreciate it, but who knows?

This film is very unusual in a lot of ways, to the point where I would describe it as singular. When you’re making the film, are you hoping it fulfills your original vision, or are you also looking to have a wide audience with it?

Kyle Edward Ball: Before I made my YouTube series, I made a short horror film that I thought people wanted to see, but I didn’t really want to make. And then I found out that people didn’t really want to see it. I learned after that point that what the audience wants to see and what you want to make are actually more similar than you’d think. Audiences are way more sophisticated and way more adventurous than people give them credit for. If you only talk to a handful of Hollywood executives, they have such a low opinion of what audiences want because of weird things like marketing and a handful of examples of egomaniac directors making their pet projects. I think if you just make a movie that you want to see, and you want to make, audiences will respond. If you make something sincere and from the heart, and I know it sounds incredibly tacky and cliché, but people say it because it’s true: if you make something from a sincere place, people will respond to it, and it will find an audience. Another example would be Darren Aronofsky’s mother!. If infamously got an audience “F” score, and I remember seeing it in the theater twice. On the second viewing, people walked out, like angrily walked out. But when it came to Netflix, it found a completely different audience, and I think that came down to how it was marketed. Audiences are smart, stop making movies that treat people like fools. Audiences will respond to a weird movie if you make it worth their while. 

Well, I certainly hope Skinamarink finds its audience, it’s a great film. Kyle, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

Kyle Edward Ball: For sure, thank you so much.

Skinamarink is out in theaters now. Film Inquiry would like to thank Kyle Edward Ball for speaking with us.