Kyle Edward Ball
- 2022Skinamarink
- 2020Heck
An Edmonton YouTuber who filmed other people's nightmares, then shot a feature of darkness and grain in the house he grew up in.
Viewers sent Ball their nightmares, and he filmed them. He started the YouTube channel, Bitesized Nightmares, at about 25, a few years after finishing NAIT's Digital Media and IT program in Edmonton in 2014. In 2020 he posted Heck, a longer short made to show he could carry a feature.
He shot Skinamarink in 2021 inside his childhood home, where his parents still live, on a budget put at $10,000 to $15,000 in different accounts, most of it crowdfunded. It premiered at the Fantasia festival in Montreal in July 2022, and IFC Midnight put it in cinemas in January 2023 before it moved to Shudder.
Ball has said Chantal Akerman's work influenced Skinamarink, and that as a teenager he leaned into Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren. He has named Michael Snow's Wavelength too. In 2024 A24 announced it would make his next feature, The Land of Nod.
Films
Where to start with Kyle Edward Ball, in the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.
Heck
A small boy wakes in the night to the sound of his mother's television blaring, and the house around him is dark and wrong. Shot with a grainy, found-footage look, it was the test run for Skinamarink.
Still from Skinamarink to come. Skinamarink
Two children wake to find their father gone and the windows and doors of the house missing. The camera stays low in dark hallways and on ceilings and corners, the picture swims with grain, and the children's whispers come with subtitles.