Everyone knows what it's like to have a childhood nightmare. Just as commonly, everyone knows that no matter how deeply engrained the nightmare can be to you, it's incredibly difficult to describe it to someone else.
Perhaps not so much for filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball. He's set on raising the bar even further. His film "Skinamarink" aims to recreate the actual feeling of being trapped in a nightmare.
Ball got his start with his YouTube channel that set out to recreate user submitted nightmares. He told Wisconsin Public Radio's "BETA" that the lack of any kind of realistic budget turned into creative breakthroughs.
"I would use kind of old Hollywood style effects and because I didn't have access to a bevy of actors, I would have to get creative on how I would tell a story," he said. "So, a lot of implying action instead of directly showing action. And when we did show actors, there would be very little performance. We would rarely, if ever, see their face."
Another element Ball used effectively was the use of low-fi audio, like old cartoons.
"I had leaned into the low-fi of audiovisual format as well, and even doing stuff like playing with old time radio and old-time cartoon audios to really kind of help buffer the narrative," Ball said.
Ball ports this technique into his first full feature, "Skinamarink," to a disorienting result. The film — named after the famous children's song — loosely follows two children, Kevin and Kaylee, as they wake up to discover all the windows and doors from their home have been removed. They camp out close to the living room TV that is the source of the cartoons.
"I always went into the intention of doing a style like that, and that's how I wrote the script and that's how I filmed it," Ball said.
One of the cartoons Ball uses is Max Fleisher's 1936 short, animated film, "Somewhere in Dreamland," which follows a similar path of a pair of siblings drifting off to sleep. Ball said he first watched the cartoon as a kid when his parents bought an old bargain bin VHS compilation tape that featured it.
"I always remembered because it's a beautiful little cartoon," Ball said. "When I wrote 'Skinamarink,' I thought, 'This is a perfect thing to feature because it's about a little boy and girl, a brother and sister, and it has them fall asleep and go into dreamland.' What a cool metaphor that I can play with."
He pairs this creepy sound design with odd-angled, static shots like when your grandparents left the camcorder on a chair forgetting it was still recording. We rarely see or hear the children or the parents. We see feet or shadows. And the dialogue is often garbled and subtitled all resulting in an unsettling effect.
"I want it to feel like a movie that was forgotten and not taking care of," Ball said.
To achieve that forgotten feeling, Ball adds the hiss and snaps common on old films from the '70s. He explains even that became a storytelling tool.
"I was even able to do neat stuff with the hiss and hum to even help propel the story," Ball said. "So even change the volume of the hiss and hum to do something simple like say, OK, we changed location or time has elapsed."
"Or even do stuff like slowly imperceptibly, lower the hiss and hum as a scene is supposed to be building as far as tension so that the audience is unconsciously leaning into the sound," Ball continued.
With a runtime of 100 minutes and no break from his aesthetic, the result can feel at times claustrophobic, again mimicking the sensation of a seemingly endless nightmare.
For Ball, it was even more personal. He shot the entire film in his childhood home.
"I went into writing the script with the idea that I would film in my childhood home," Ball said. "It was great. There (were) other surreal parts, too. Like on the final day, that's the first time we filmed in Kevin's room, which was my room growing up."
"I just had this weird moment in between takes where I'm like, 'This is weird. I'm filming a movie in the room that I would have dreams as a kid about filming movies. It's all come weirdly back to this room.' But it was strange," he continued.
Ball's early work on YouTube and the grassroots buzz for "Skinamarink" owe a lot to Reddit. He said the spreading of the word and even the advance leak of the film on Reddit led to a strong word of mouth campaign. Ball stated that the internet may have been his co-director.
"It all comes back to Reddit. I had started my YouTube channel, and it wasn't really picking up steam until I started posting videos on Reddit," Ball said. "Before I was even finished the final cut of the film, I had cut the trailer for the movie and posted it on the filmmakers subreddit, and that's where we got our distribution deal."
Audience reaction has run the gamut from unsettled to praise to confusion or even to boredom, but there's no denying the originality of the project. That's what Ball aimed for.
"I would say for the most part, people said, 'Oh, it's uncanny, it's strange, it's weird.' And I can't be more thankful that people are responding the way that I intended," Ball said.
"Skinamarink" is now available to stream via Shudder.