Skinamarink and My Childhood Fears
Skinamarink and My Childhood Fears
Darkness. You creep through the shadows of the landing, you daren’t turn the light on in case mum and dad know you’re out of your bed. Every step is a methodical act, praying the floorboards don’t creak. Your bedroom feels like an eternity away, each step a grain of sand in a desert.
It’s not quite so terrifying when you look back on these moments, but when you’re a kid, your mind has a way of making mundane situations become set pieces for terror. Skinamarink - the divisive debut feature length from writer-director Kyle Edward Ball, has been nothing but a grainy 1 hour and 40 minutes of corridors to half of its audience. To the other half though, it’s tapped into an infantile terror that you didn’t know was still in you.
The Plot
Kevin and Kaylee, two young children, wake up in the dead of night alone. Their father has mysteriously disappeared, and all the windows and doors have vanished, trapping them in their own home. Comforted by archaic cartoons on the TV, they hope for rescue, but something is in the house with them, and it has sinister intentions.
That doesn’t sound like a film, and it barely is. The narrative is incredibly loose and ambiguous, which allows the fear to resonate long after the movie is over, as you question what it all meant.
There’s no real call to action other than to play with lego and watch cartoons, and over the course of its run time, only a handful of events happen - some minor, some horrific, some existential. But the downtime in between these events really helps to put you in an almost hypnotic state, if you’ll let it, which makes it one of the most unique films I’ve ever seen.
Comfort as a weapon
Using around 40 overlays to give the film a weathered effect with grain and imperfections, it gives the familiar feeling of an old home video your family took in the 90s. The sound is dulled and distorted, to the point that subtitles are required to be able to fully understand its characters. These combine to give an almost dream-like quality, and when nothing immediately engaging is happening, it feels almost meditative.
Clever use of childhood tropes keep to the theme, and give it a further surreal quality. Did you always find it weird, and slightly ominous, that you never saw the faces of parents on kids cartoons? Skinamarink somehow successfully goes the whole film without showing a single (human) face, barely even showing a character, instead showing the results of the characters actions.
There is no soundtrack, just the jovial music and the whizz-bonk sound effects blaring from the TV. At times, it makes you feel like you’re 5 years old again, watching something you shouldn’t be.
Helpless horror
The soothing audio-visuals and the nostalgic childhood setting lay down a comfortable foundation, so it’s even more jarring when the horror kicks off. At first, it’s a voice, that of an adult. It tells them to do things, things that aren’t always nice.
There’s something about watching a child in a horror movie that hits like no other protagonist. We watch with adult eyes, as a child innocently walks into harm's way, and we are powerless to stop it, like hanging over the big drop on a rollercoaster - we can scream and shout all we want, but the descent is inevitable. It gives the same horrible gut feeling of Danny naively walking into room 237, but manages to keep that tension throughout.
The horror naturally evolves and grows at a perfect pace, giving enough room to reflect on previous frights, whilst simultaneously brewing the next. What starts off as a surrealist creeper ends as a full on audio-visual night terror.
A Divisive Dreamscape
I completely understand why 50% of the people who watch this don't like it. Through the lens of a typical film, it's 1 hour and 40 minutes of long static corridor shots, with little character or plot development. If you view it as more of an experience, however, and allow the atmosphere to envelop you, it's a truly unique watch that brings those childhood fears back to the surface, and makes you fear the dark corners of the room once more.
If you’re looking for recommendations for similar films to Skinamarink, you’ll be hard pressed to find anything quite like it.
If you can think of any other movies, games or shorts that give off a similar sense of dread, let me know in the comments below.
