Skinamarink is a “Don’t watch This at 3am Challenge” YouTube video but with the overreacting millionaire being replaced by naive, terrified and mostly faceless children. This movie is a nightmare straight from a child’s brain. It feels like a collection of primal fears for a child, losing parents, losing a way out and obviously, losing the joy of screentime. Skinamarink takes everything safe from you, slowly, any kind of safety it gives you throughout, it takes away at some point, and I, don’t like that.
We start off dark, just a hallway and some feet, TV chatter in the background and a family getting ready for bed. The shot stays as is, while the opening credits play, like they would at the beginning of a classic 60s western, or as its more commonly referred; Calamity Jane. This gives the film a nostalgic feel, another way of giving you that false sense that everything is alright. The two kids and dad get into bed before one of them gets up, sleepwalking and injures themselves while playing hide and seek with someone in their sleep. We’re introduced to the story telling style here, as the camera is just showing corners of the room, dark hallways and endless dark voids through open doorways. The camera has a constant digital grain to it too, warping and crudely repeating itself on a loop from beginning to end of this film. The audio plays out as if it was recorded, put on vinyl and then played from a gramophone while we listened. The audio cracked and popped almost mimicking the grain throughout, never leaving us with pure silence or blackness, never giving us a moment to breathe in a fade to black or a cut to black to leave space between a scene.
The kids wake the next morning to find their dad has gone, along with all doors and windows of the house. No way to escape and nobody to call with the phones being down. They shout for their dad, walking into all rooms of the house and seeing all routes to the world around them are gone, blended into the wall as if they were never even intended to be there. The innocence is shown around here as the children sleep down in the living room that night, with the TV on for comfort, showing 1930s cartoons over and over to ease their overwhelmed minds. They sleep and wake, assuming it must be daytime, with no real way to tell. They get up and carry on, making some Lego and colouring in to pass the time. The cartoons continue to play as the music carries us through the next 20 to 30 minutes of repetition. This is broken by a sudden noise and a chair now on the ceiling, no jump scares, no change in music or tone, just matter of fact, oh, there seems to be a chair on the ceiling, anyway, here’s some juice.
This way of telling a story is difficult for some to get on board with, a quiet and slow pace with confusing choices of shots, cuts and audio. The shots show nothing, rarely even a movement in some of them. We may get a foot walking by or a light being turned on or off, changing our visibility. The majority of the screen is taken up by the fizzing and popping emptiness, complete lack of light. The way in which the grain moves and morphs makes you look into the darkness, trying to find something to make you jump, something to reveal itself and relieve the tension you feel. The choice to have 40 minutes of the film building up to one chair on the ceiling brought on a sense that this film is just another experimental film that is trying to do something new and failing miserably. You ease at this point, maybe even scoff to the person to your right, commenting on the lack of scares, “Gosh there really isn’t much to jump at is there Louise?”. The more the film goes on, the more this slow intro feels intentional in it sets up for that expectation.
The choice to have a constant digital grain means that the darkness is never truly nothing, its a part of the image, something to pay attention to. I feel like I’ve been trained by horror movies to find that face in the dark, or that clue of who is behind all of it. Putting a tangible face to a fear channels it into something to be scared of, usually something that doesn’t exist or at least hopefully not. Living in the world where the demon from Insidious exists would change how I make most decisions. The thing about Skinamrink’s lack of big, bad, loud monster makes it worse because it makes it something we can’t imagine, something that could be anything, anywhere, with no rules. We have nothing to fear directly, not even darkness, it makes a point to not hide things in those dark voids. We can only fear what could be, anything our brain can think up.
Our first taste of jump scareery is a doll, floating in the air, a child screams and runs away in a POV shot, peaking the low quality microphone, playing through the gramophone. This first scare gave me full body pins and needles, a shockwave sent through me that only Haunting of Hill House and too much wasabi in one bite have achieved before. The scares themselves came quite sparingly, maybe four or five if you don’t count the ones that cut the tension with sudden audio changes from scene to scene. The ones that screamed at you like a crescendo of the tension that’s been building in you since the beginning of the movie were horribly effective every single time. The darkness and hopelessness of the movie means that even after a faceless girl screams at you, there’s nowhere safe to go back to. It’s tainted all safety, taken everything away that made it bearable, it takes parents, siblings and again, worst of all, cartoons. A kid can escape into a ridiculous world of cartoons to forget about the perils of childhood, not here though lol hahaha because the demon has that to play with too.
In general, the kids being our only characters makes this horror film so incredibly sad and innocent. They wake up, no dad and no doors, no windows and no time. They’re scared in their own home, a place where they could be themselves and live freely only hours before any of this happened. Even though they’re in this hopeless situation, they carry on, building Lego, drawing and colouring in. Just to pass their endless time. They work together, getting juice for one another and checking in on each other. The final drop of hope is gone when Kevin is left alone in his house. Everything he once knew is gone, any semblance of structure is gone, anything he once thought was constant has changed. He hurts himself as the entity asked him to do because he doesn’t know what else to do, no plans of if it might help him, no pleading or bargaining for another way to bring everyone back, just obedience to the demon. Kevin tries the phone again and gets through to 911. He only says that he hurts himself, nothing about the doors, his family or the demon torturing them. I don’t know if I’m giving this four year old too much credit but he stops talking all of a sudden after the operator tells him that they can send someone to help. He must know that they can send everyone they like, there’s no way in, no way anyone can get in and help him get out.
The film ends on a note that’s hard to figure out. We finally see a face, a silhouette in the morphing grain, not moving, not talking. Kevin asks its name. He doesn’t seem scared though, opposite to how I was, digging my toes into my shoes so hard that I thought I might leave the theatre with sandals. I went into the film expecting nothing more than an average scare, nothing that left me feeling this way. Drained, terrified and devastated. There was no hope in this film, nothing leading to hope, we were all just getting through it like the kids. I hope to feel this affected by film again, maybe in a different way, something more happy and excited maybe. It makes me sad that people will watch this differently to me, not get what it is or at least not get it how I got it. I’m glad it exists and I watched it, I’m now also glad I can choose to never watch it again. Eat shit Skinamarink
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