The experimental Canadian horror film Skinamarink was leaked online during its festival run, which gave the film a viral word-of-mouth build similar to the Blair Witch Project. With a budget of only $15,000, Skinamarink was shot digitally in the childhood home of Edmonton filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball. Featuring no real conventional narrative nor on-screen protagonists, Skinamarink is told from the point of view of two young children alone in their house, encountering an evil entity in the darkness.
Skinamarink had its World Premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal in the summer of 2022. The terrifying horror movie was eventually picked up for distribution by IFC Midnight and the horror streaming service Shudder. In advance of its streaming release, Skinamarink was released on January 13, 2023, to 692 cinemas and earned an opening weekend gross of $890,000 (via Bloody Disgusting). However, its accidental leak might lead to even more success.
A Festival Technical Error Leaked Skinamarink Online
The viral build for Skinamarink began after the film was leaked during one of Skinamarink's digital film festival screenings. These screenings have become more commonplace since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, often using a secured streaming platform such as Shift72. However, there was a technical glitch with Skinamarink's screening, and the film was soon ed and available all over YouTube and TikTok.
"I think people were under the impression we didn't have distribution and they were doing us a favor by pirating, but we did have a plan," says Kyle Edward Ball in an interview about the leak (via horror genre movie like Skinamarink, the leak ended up helping to build buzz about the film. Skinamarink went viral on TikTok and YouTube, with people calling the film the scariest film ever, and Skinamarink even ranked ahead of films such as The Black Phone and Bodies Bodies Bodies on lists of the top horror films of 2022.
How Skinamarink Repeats Blair Witch Project's & Paranormal Activity's Marketing Success
The viral build of Skinamarink follows in the footsteps of similar word-of-mouth campaigns for The Blair Witch Project in 1999 and Paranormal Activity a decade later. The Blair Witch Project movie was infamously one of the first films to promote itself online, with the film's lore-building website leading many to believe that The Blair Witch Project movie events actually occurred. Similarly, as one of the first horror acquisitions for Jason Blum and Blumhouse, Paranormal Activity went from sitting on the shelf for two years to becoming a viral hit in the fall of 2009 with its immensely successful "Tweet Your Scream" campaign, which asked horror fans to send tweets asking for Paranormal Activity to be expanded to their city.
Another way that Skinamarink is similar to both The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity is how the hype should probably be taken with a grain of salt. The very experimental non-narrative structure of Skinamarink can and has divided audiences, not unlike the audience response to The Blair Witch Project (via Polygon). However, the fact that an ultra-low-budget experimental horror film from Canada can gain such attention says a lot about the thirst from horror audiences for new and original content.
