When I was 7 or 8 years old and asleep in the room I shared with my little brother, the streetlight visible from our window suddenly went out. I woke up, scared and not knowing why, except that it was far darker than it ought to be. I got out of bed and felt my way toward the door and started down the hallway to my parents’ bedroom. After a few steps I bumped into a wall. I felt to the right; there was another wall. On the left was a third wall. I could go back a little ways, but the hallway now simply stopped after about six feet. There were things on the floor, but I couldn’t tell what they were. I screamed for my mother, and then for my brother, who had been asleep in the bed next to mine. No one answered.

Eventually my mom heard me and the lights came back on and I was discovered in the closet I had mistaken for the hallway. (My brother had actually woken up before me and successfully high-tailed it down the hall and into our parents’ bed, where he was sleeping peacefully, the little jerk.) But the sensation of the world having abruptly rearranged itself in such a way as to leave me shouting, unheard, in the dark, had been etched into my brain, and that is the sensation Kyle Edward Ball so successfully evokes in his new feature Skinamarink, which became something of a viral sensation after a copy leaked online last year, and is now playing in movie theaters.

I can’t imagine another film doing this successfully, or even wanting to see this particular film again, but it’s a remarkable achievement.

I don’t want to call Skinimarink, which was shot in Ball’s childhood home for a reported $15,000, a must-see film; it is terrifying and unique but it is also, for long stretches, very boring. The odd thing about it, and the thing that makes it worth watching and thinking about for people who are interested in movies as art, rather than solely as entertainment, is that this boredom is part of the terror. The movie’s threadbare story can be gathered from the snippets of dialogue between Kevin and Kaylee, a 4-year-old boy and his 6-year-old sister, who find themselves lost in their own home. The camera, as far as I can tell, is actually sitting on the floor for most of the movie; it is not so much shot from an adult’s artful interpretation of a child’s perspective, like E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial or Stand By Me, but shot as a child who is prey for a supernatural monster might document the experience. Sometimes my kindergartner creeps off with my phone and takes a bunch of pictures and two-second-long videos; this is like a movie composed almost entirely of those videos. Many of the movie’s shots are of walls and the corners of rooms; sometimes those shots are interrupted by something frightening, but when that happens, it’s all the scarier because these shots are more often just … there. The possibility of the uncanny makes us squint all the harder, and there are perhaps too many times where we don’t earn anything for our patience, but that’s a familiar experience from childhood, too, and it doesn’t diminish the fear. The frustration is also a part of the fright, and the cumulative effect is frankly quite sad, something the movie has in common with distributor Shudder’s TV series Channel Zero, each season of which was inspired by a creepypasta—an internet-viral scary story.

The movie begins when Kevin (Lucas Paul) falls down the stairs and hits his head—although, as with most things that happen in Skinamarink, the action takes place offscreen. We hear him crying, and we hear the crying stop abruptly as a car door shuts. Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), has a firmer grip on reality, and when the camera is sticking closer to her point of view, we acquire more context about what’s going on. Kevin comes back, apparently uninjured, but soon thereafter familiar fixtures in the house start to disappear: doors, windows, parents. Kevin’s plaintive requests for information are rarely answered, and never satisfactorily. He takes refuge in a half-constructed Lego city, and in old Fleischer Bros. cartoons like “Small Fry” and “The Cobweb Hotel,” which are terrifying and a little nauseating in their own singsong way. It’s never clear what time it is. Something keeps intruding on his playtime, luring his sister upstairs, ruining the cartoons, and moving his Legos. We’re never told what this thing is. We’re never told why it seems interested in Kevin, or what happened to his parents, or his sister. Windows and doors vanish artlessly from the film’s carefully blank, almost information-less shots; sometimes a humming noise accompanies the vanishing, and sometimes they simply fade away, leaving a bare wall behind. Because the movie is so dark, we find ourselves squinting into the grainy recesses of its rooms and furniture, inventing things that might be making shapes and movements that are simply the byproduct of Ball’s camera seeking light and not finding it.

As video technology has advanced, its limits have held special fascination for horror auteurs, especially the peculiar sub-genus who pursue suspension of disbelief with such single-mindedness that their work flirts with the avant-garde. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s fake found-footage flick Blair Witch Project rode to popularity on a campaign of delightful lies about its origins; those lies were buttressed by the shaky-cam nature of the movie itself, which made the unknown actors and their script’s woodland setting that much more believable. (Skinamarink boasts the contemporary version of Blair Witch’s success story: The film leaked after an online screening and acquired substantial word of mouth on Tiktok, where there are plenty of DIY horror micro-auteurs and their decidedly non-micro followings.) Paranormal Activity has a far more traditionally structured screenplay, but static night-vision cinematography is what makes it actually frightening; the same quality belongs to Danny Boyle’s zombie masterpiece 28 Days Later, shot in part on a consumer-grade camcorder. (Young people: A camcorder is a kind of stand-alone camera the elderly used to take videos of their kids and vacations when they were your age.) Our children’s cell phone videos, our film dork friends’ noble-sounding documentaries, and the footage from our security cameras are all primarily used to describe things as they are, not to tell stories. And for storytellers, those forms come with a kind of hard-wired trustworthiness that can be irresistible even if the tools themselves are profoundly limited. Those limitations suggest that anything that lies beyond them lies beyond knowledge itself, and that suggestion is increasingly precious as the world becomes more explicable and superstitions we held dear comparatively recently—satanic influence, faked celebrity deaths, secret alien visits—recede into shadow or absurdity.

I think Skinamarink is the first movie I’ve seen that is shot in such a way as to show only what its child protagonist can understand. I can’t imagine another film doing this successfully, or even wanting to see this particular film again, but it’s a remarkable achievement. It evokes the nameless dread of barely verbal childhood so thoroughly and uncompromisingly that it remains frightening long after it ends, not because it forces us to question the rational world, but because it makes us remember a time before we could understand anything at all. It takes skill, maybe even virtuosity, to make a 99-minute narrative feature from that perspective, and when Skinamarink frightens, it terrifies. In one scene, Kaylee goes to her parents’ room to ask for help, and her mother vanishes before her—and our—eyes. The movie’s voices are as blown-out and distorted as its visuals; sometimes the dialogue is subtitled, but the subtitles don’t always match what we hear. And once the mother is gone, we hear a new voice, distorted almost to the edge of hearing. “Kaylee,” it says. “Look under the bed.” She does. There is nothing there. “Look under the bed,” the voice says again. And she looks again.