Mark Jenkin and Kyle Edward Ball both make movies that are more akin to music: They want viewers to feel their films rather than striving to interpret meaning. Jenkin’s newest feature, Shudder).

Both are directors who made their new films on contained budgets, shot them out of sync—adding sound effects, dialogue and soundtrack later—and edited in the very rooms from where they talk to each other across Zoom in our newest Magic Hour conversation. Over the course of their chat, we see the camera that Jenkin shot Enys Men on, and his memorabilia from Peter Sasdy’s 1972 sci-fi horror The Stone Tape. (The soundtrack “is just something else,” Jenkin enthuses. “I love the unsubtlety of it.”)

Ball and Jenkin reveal how they create films that “look under the surface of things”, how they work to build feelings of claustrophobia and dread through technical production decisions. Sharing that his partner (and Enys Men star) Mary Woodvine had to watch Skinamarink from the shadows on the far side of the room, Jenkin praises Ball for the atmosphere that he created in his micro-budget feature about two children whose parents have disappeared from their house: “What’s so terrifying about your film and so unnerving was how this sense of an outside world is absent.”

That absence is elevated by no sounds bleeding through from outside the shoot location. Ball shot picture only, adding sound later: The dialogue was recorded as ADR, and almost all of the sound effects came from an effects catalog (”except I had to do my own foley of footsteps ‘cos we all know footsteps are a pain to get”). Filming this way, says Ball, sometimes created the conditions in the room that the audience feels on the screen. “When we filmed a few scenes it felt eerie and quiet and I feel that that showed on screen.”

Telling Jenkin that he found Enys Men “objectively incredibly gorgeous”, Ball asserts “you can play with the camera so much more if you… can compartmentalize the sound.” “I can’t record sync dialogue with the camera that I use,” Jenkin replies, “and I don’t understand why anybody ever records sync sound!”

The limitations that both filmmakers set for the mechanics of their process are, in fact, creatively elevating. “You’ve gotta have those limitations to have the freedom; once you’ve set the boundaries then you can do anything within those boundaries,” Jenkin enthuses. “Watching your movie last night I just said to Mary, my partner, ‘this is genius’. Because you’ve set all these limitations which play to the strengths of what you’re doing. Those limitations, they’re everything really. Building the world out of fragments, and a lot of that is fragments of sound as well, which I think your film did so brilliantly.”

As the directors discuss influences from the late 1960s and 1970s—including Penda’s Fen, Don’t Look Now, The Wicker Man, The Exorcist, 2001: A Space Odyssey (Ball’s favorite film), Solaris and The Wiz—Jenkins says “It’s that era I really love,” explaining why he set Enys Men in that time. “Seventies TV in the UK was kind of more cinematic than most movies these days.” And there was another aesthetic consideration: “This always sounds frivolous when I say it… I knew the year was going to be written a lot and I really like the way the year 1973 looks when it’s written.”

Ball meanwhile, set his film in 1995 because “it was a magical time before kindergarten, just before we got the internet in my house… it didn’t exist for a lower middle class family like ours.”

Later in the conversation, Jenkin and Ball exchange their experiences with audiences seeking further explanation for their films, versus those who enjoy the process of letting the story wash over them, and how that has resulted in a wide variation in Letterboxd ratings for both Enys Men and Skinamarink. That’s not a bad thing, in their view. Says Ball: “Really, what more could you ask for?”

The power of watching cinema in a black box, whether that be a darkened living room or a favorite picture theater, also came up, with both filmmakers singing the praises of turning off your phone and settling in for the ride. “Like, you wouldn’t watch a play in your living room,” says Ball, Jenkin adding: “What, the phone’s ringing and, you know, and you’re making a cup of tea and people are coming in and out? It’s sacred. It’s sacred, and it’s important. If one good thing came out of the lockdowns… it was the understanding that watching stuff at home is fine, but the cinematic experience is different. You can’t substitute it with something else.”

Adds Ball: “It’s almost like going to church, right?”