Born to Be Viral

An offbeat horror movie that wouldn't exist without the internet.

- By Alison Willmore

Skinamarink is as hair raising | watching it. All those long, atmospheric shots of the grainy darkness beyond open doorways and the flickering light of the TV from the back of the sofa lose their impact.

More interesting is how Skinamarink traffics in horror concepts that were born from, or at least obsessed over on, the internet as it is boring, which doesn't feel like a failure as much as the goal of this microbudget effort. An experimental horror movie shot in writer-director Kyle Edward Ball's childhood home in Edmonton, Canada, it forgoes standard storytelling to re-create the sensation of being scared more precisely, being scared when you're a kid and the night has transformed your bedroom into something alien and the hallway between you and the bathroom into a no-man's-land full of monsters.