The Future of Horror Movies Is on YouTube

Horror is a genre of upstarts. Many of its strangest, most striking films, from “The Night of the Living Dead” to “The Blair Witch Project,” come from first-timers working on shoestring budgets—and these days the first-timers can be found, increasingly, on YouTube. In 2018, Kyle Edward Ball launched a channel where he released videos based on users’ descriptions of their nightmares. The entries, with such deceptively simple titles as “sound in the hall” and “grandma,” are lo-fi, no more than a few minutes each; they dial into dream logic, primal dread, and a viewer’s instinct to fill in the gaps, a grainy shot of a bedroom door inviting the question of what’s waiting on the other side. The shorts paved the way for Ball’s experimental film “Skinamarink,” which became a word-of-mouth phenomenon in 2022