My parents used to say “Skinnymalink” rather than “Skinamarink”. As affectionate insults go I suppose it was better than one alternative description, which was “long streak of piss”. The dictionary tells us the word has something to do with an old Scottish children’s song, Skinamalinky Long Legs, which (to vary the spelling yet again) went: “Skinny Malinky long legs / Big banana feet / Went to the pictures but couldnae find a seat / When the picture started / Skinny Malinky farted / Skinny Malinky long legs / Big banana feet.”
The name probably came from the dialect word “Manikie” a little man (like mannequin) – so a skinamarink is skinny little man. All of which, perversely, has absolutely nothing to do with Kyle Edward Ball’s bizarre film testing the boundaries of what’s possible in narrative cinema. How much can be left out and it’ll all still make a kind of sense? In Skinamarink, for example, there is no main character, and apart from a fleeting close-up of something ghastly, nor is there any human face to be seen.
It’s found footage – ish – without any of the contortions found-footage movies go through for it all to add up. No key characters to be introduced, no arc to be established, no final destination to be aimed at, no resolutions to be had. All as if it what we’re watching were just happening and the camera just happened to be on.
Instead, blur and grain, odd glimpses of things – the top of a lampshade, a flicker from a TV left on, a chair leg, a pair of human legs at one point, clad in pyjamas. After quite a lot of this indistinct, blurry vagueness, forcing much leaning forward straining for clues, we can conclude some things but not a whole lot. We’re in a house, it’s night-time, there might be a child somewhere about, maybe this is all taking place in the wee small hours during a sleepover. Is the house haunted? Or are those child’s whispers?
The images are dark, the sound is muted, the framings are all off and the lighting, what there is of it, comes from a TV screen or one of those plug-in lights.
The film started life as a short called Heck, which itself grew out of director Kyle Edward Ball’s YouTube channel, Bitesized Nightmares, where he’d get people to send in their nightmares and he’d recreate them. So this is one of those, done at feature length, which might be a touch too long for most pilgrims in the realm of cinema, but you have to applaud Ball’s… vision, odd word considering how hard it is to see anything at all.
Grasping for comparisons – that moment in the Japanese horror film Audition, where the sack suddenly lurches, it has the nightmarishness of that. Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity have to be mentioned, though Ball himself says Chantal Akerman’s featureless, nothing-happening style is an influence, as well as Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren (neither of whom I’ve heard of, to my shame), plus usual suspects Kubrick and Lynch.
I watched this with my jetlagged brother who, with half a bottle of wine inside him, snored quietly through most of it. Fair enough. It’s not exactly gripping, but it is highly evocative, its purply-orangey colour scheme, flickers and images that seem to be half made up from a digital sensor’s need to register something. It “creates” artefacts, ghost images if you like. Similarly, by the end, almost as if by magic or osmosis, and without the contrivance of most found footage, a story has been told. Ball has piggybacked on his audience’s knowledge of movies, horror movies in particular. He’s done the suggesting and we’ve done the work.
Something is lurking in the house – a force spiritual, parental, abusive. Not capturing it – because it can’t be caught – is what Ball sets out to do. Evocation of nightmare very nicely done and dusted.
Skinamarink – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2026
