Before there was Skinamarink, 2023’s low-budget experimental horror oddity that took the watching-Shudder-at-2 a.m. sicko crowd by storm, there was Heck, 30 minutes of lo-fi nightmare fuel that’s somehow even more unsettling than the feature it inspired.
On his YouTube channel Bitesize Nightmares, Kyle Edward Ball adapted his viewers’ real-life dreams into the most spine-tingling ASMR you could imagine. Full of locked-off shots of liminal spaces, color-drenched close-ups, and Ball’s own deep-throated narration, the hallucinatory horror that populated Bitesize Nightmares, which ran in earnest from 2017 to 2020, felt familiar to an internet that loved a good scare. But they were presented in a visual form that even the most evocative creepypasta could only hint at. It was as if Ball had used Final Cut Pro plug-ins to summon the devil himself.
Heck was the apex of the experiment. Five times longer than the average Bitesize Nightmare, the film follows “Boy” after “he wakes up in the middle of night to the sound of his mom’s television blaring,” per Ball’s official description. The Boy appears to wander around the house without much care, calling out to “Mommy” as he struggles with what to do or where to go next. Title cards appear like jump scares: “2 sleeps”; “5 sleeps”; “49 sleeps”; “314 sleeps.” As with his previous nightmares, Ball uses white noise and pixelated imagery to turn the mundane setting of a home into a pit of quicksand. You can feel yourself sinking into it with each passing second.
There’s a story to Heck, and even something resembling payoff. In the moment, they feel like much-needed oxygen in a suffocating, narrative-free space. But this is Ball’s trick: The semblance of character work he threads into Heck would make even Lars von Trier squirm. The diabolical pacing and punctuation feel like the extreme interpretation of lessons learned from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (don’t show the shark!) or Ridley Scott’s Alien. (Not too much Xenomorph!) He leaves plenty of room for our personal mixtures of nostalgia, childhood fears, and grown-up doomsaying to flood the zone. This is how actual nightmares are formed.
Ball indulged even more in his cryptic style for Skinamarink, and many viewers couldn’t stomach that style over the course of 100 minutes. This half-hour short version feels like a good “for everyone” recommendation — in quotes because it will surely scare the bejesus out of the unprepared. It’s the rare movie that seems fit to play in the background of a Halloween party, or with the lights all the way down with complete concentration. Heck lurks. Heck haunts. Heck is.
Where to watch: Heck is streaming on YouTube (see embed above). Skinamarink is available to rent on various services.
Polygon’s annual Halloween Countdown is a 31-day run of short recommendations of the best horror movies, shows, TV episodes, and online specials to stream for the Halloween season. You can find the entire calendar here.