Skinamarink
Lucas Paul as Kevin in Skinamarink
Regardless of your thoughts on Skinamarink, it’s a bona fide success story. Kyle Edward Ball, a YouTuber (Heck a precursor short film that heavily inspired Skinamarink, can be watched for free on his channel here) and director made his film on the staggeringly low budget of $15,000 CAD (that’s about £12,000). According to Box Office Mojo as of the 6th of February 2023, the film has grossed approximately $1,984,760. Now, whilst that’s not an earth-shattering figure on paper, it’s an objectively remarkable profit. This sort of cinematic achievement in the modern theatrical landscape rarely happens anymore, and when it does, it’s more than justified to celebrate it.
But what is a Skinamarink, and why are people shitting their pants over it?
It’s 1995. Two children, Kevin and Kaylee, wake in the middle of the night only to discover that their father is gone, and all the windows and doors have disappeared. How is this possible? Yet, and more pressingly, is there something else in this house with them?
A warning: this is a lo-fi, microbudget, experimental horror film that requires an intimidating amount of patience. Skinamarink derives its scare-factor from what’s lurking in the grainy darkness of the night, focusing on what the human mind can conjure up from nothing. Ball spends a lot of time pointing the camera at liminal space – corners, floors, ceilings. To the average moviegoer, this may sound like a boring, time-wasting pain in the arse, and the polarising reception has only served to prove that point.
Surprisingly, I didn’t find this too egregious, despite how many times it threatened to bore me to tears. Skinamarink demands you become acclimated to the environment Kevin and Kaylee have found themselves in, and for that to work, you must pay attention to the geography of the space. Furthermore, you really have to be watching this in the correct environment. Letting the liminal spaces and grainy footage wash over you at 4pm on a Saturday afternoon would probably put you to sleep, but watch this in bed in the middle of the night with all the lights off? You may just find yourself cowering under the covers.
I genuinely believe this film could do with a handy ‘headphones recommended’ notice in the opening credits, because a lot of the scares come from startling you out of nowhere. The sound of a child screaming, or the ringing of a terrifying toy telephone is truly accentuated if you have no distractions around you. Indeed, Ball’s focus on building dread with nothingness, only succeeds to make these shocking interruptions more pronounced. Following in the footsteps of David Lynch (a filmmaker Ball cites as a big inspiration), Ball also understands that you can really imprint on a viewer with a good ol’ fashioned nightmare face plucked fresh straight from the uncanny valley. I counted three, three times, where I thought to myself: “Oh, great, that will be imprinted into my brain forever, cheers Kyle”.
Where Skinamarink faulters is mainly due to overreliance, perhaps overenthusiasm, on the concept. It’s both a blessing and a curse. I always appreciate when a film serves to make your imagination run wild with possibilities over *what* exactly could be lurking in the dark, but when the film is 99% darkness, we as an audience aren’t always going to be wondering what’s going to emerge from it. This goes back, again, to the pacing and runtime. There’s an understandably difficult to reach Goldilocks zone in horror filmmaking where being exposed to the threat of seeing something frightening isn’t a constant presence within the film, and so when the set pieces of dread occur, when normalcy is thrown out the window, we’re especially heightened to it. I think one of the problems with Skinamarink is that we’re constantly submerged in seeing liminal space, and there’s sometimes nothing that lurks out of it. An experimental narrative can yield interesting results, but it can also sometimes sink the fear we feel.
Be that as it may, the very last shot of this tentative, polarising, and unexpectedly lucrative horror film is incredibly, deeply effective. I was thrown into a childlike state, blocking out what I was looking at by using my foot to cover my eyeline towards the TV.
If you have memories of being a child and waking up in the pitch black of the night, letting the TV glare be the only light that illuminates the room, Skinamarink promises to take you back to that time … in the most traumatising way possible.
Skinamarink is available to watch in the UK on Shudder.
