It’s weird! It always comes back to Reddit. I had my little YouTube channel, and it didn’t really pick up steam until I started posting the videos on Reddit. And then it picked up. Then I cut the trailer for the movie, posted it on the filmmaker subreddit, and that’s where we got our distribution deal.
Then the film got leaked in October of last year. People started talking about it on Reddit, and even, like, sharing the leak on Reddit. And there was this other weird thing, too, where people would talk about the movie, but they wouldn’t wanna say how they saw it. So they’d start talking about it by accident as if it was this cursed piece of found footage.
Then Jonathan Barkan, the gentleman who picked us up for distribution, posted a very erudite, smart, concise thing about why he thought it was wrong for people to pirate the movie in this particular context, and that blew up on Reddit. And now there’s a Skinamarink subreddit dedicated to the movie. So, it all comes back to the internet.
In a weird way, specifically, it always comes back to Reddit. My director of photography, when we were shaping the look of the movie, would reference subreddits like r/weirdcore and r/liminalspace, and this became a part of our language.
I’ve had to pull back from all the online attention because there’s so much discussion of it online. I had to just consciously say, “I’m not responding to DMs anymore, thank you so much for the fan mail, but I’m just one person.” So the internet experience has been insane. A few years ago, anytime anyone online said anything about my work, I would comment on it and be like, “Thank you so much.” And now there’s so much I just can’t keep up with it.
Yeah, you can’t always read the comments.
I think in general, I’ve been spared fairly well. I got my first homophobic hate mail the other day, and it didn’t even hurt me that much, oddly. It just didn’t feel that harsh, and I posted about it, and a bunch of people commented, “Congratulations, you’ve made it.”
And then I thought, okay, this is just one thing someone said, and I’m just a gay, cis white male. Like, imagine what Jane [Schoenbrun], with We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, had to put up with, with their movie, right? Like, I should count myself lucky.
It does feel like there’s been this wave of queer, experimental indie horror filmmakers, from Skinamarink to We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and The Outwaters.
