When I was a child the thing that scared me most was the dark. My bed was faced towards the door of my bedroom, which faced down a corridor, the stairs at the far end; I laid awake completely terrified for hours most nights at the things I could see in the dark. I saw figures coming up the stairs, the doors along the corridor fade away into nothing, and the pitch black slowly encroach on my doorway to engulf me. This combined with the creaks and groans of an old house, noises I didn’t understand and couldn’t recognise, made the middle of the night my greatest fear. As a teenager and now adult my greatest fear is getting lost, and my nightmares regularly see me getting lost in a place I know. Houses where the layout is shifting, roads that lead nowhere, and the unmistakable feeling that something just out of sight is watching my every move.
Suffice to say when I heard of Skinamarink I was both extremely excited by its premise, and yet totally terrified to watch it. But I did pluck up the courage to go see it, at the Prince Charles Cinema, one of the few cinemas in the UK that is even showing it. The audience reaction was mixed for sure, some bored, some laughing, and some like myself were utterly terrified.
When siblings Kevin (Lucas Paul) and his sister Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) awake in the middle of the night to find their father (Ross Paul) missing, they begin to explore the house. Windows and doors begin to move or disappear, and a menacing voice beckons and torments the children from the shadows.
Skinamarink is probably the scariest cinema going experience I’ve ever had. I won’t sugar coat it, I was petrified. I think I spent most of the film transfixed at the lower left corner of the screen, unable to draw my gaze towards the centre of the screen out of sheer terror.
But I can firmly say that this will not be everyone’s takeaway from the film, and due to the experimental nature of Skinamarink many will lose patience within the first few minutes.
Suffice to say when I heard of Skinamarink I was both extremely excited by its premise, and yet totally terrified to watch it. But I did pluck up the courage to go see it, at the Prince Charles Cinema, one of the few cinemas in the UK that is even showing it. The audience reaction was mixed for sure, some bored, some laughing, and some like myself were utterly terrified.
When siblings Kevin (Lucas Paul) and his sister Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) awake in the middle of the night to find their father (Ross Paul) missing, they begin to explore the house. Windows and doors begin to move or disappear, and a menacing voice beckons and torments the children from the shadows.
Skinamarink is probably the scariest cinema going experience I’ve ever had. I won’t sugar coat it, I was petrified. I think I spent most of the film transfixed at the lower left corner of the screen, unable to draw my gaze towards the centre of the screen out of sheer terror.
But I can firmly say that this will not be everyone’s takeaway from the film, and due to the experimental nature of Skinamarink many will lose patience within the first few minutes.
Skinamarink defies the basic laws of filmmaking to present perhaps the closest depiction to a true nightmare that I can imagine seeing on screen. The ‘story’ is obtuse, refusing to present a clear through-line to follow. You are denied clear sight of any character in the film, or clear sight of much of the house at that. Characters are almost exclusively framed from behind or below the knees, and the camera often occupies a space close to the floor or is pointed in a strange and unidentifiable location within the seemingly labyrinthian house. The entire film takes place in near total darkness, with every single shot either under or over-exposed to such excess that you’ll rarely be able to work out exactly what you’re looking at.
I have never seen a film like Skinamarink before, one that intentionally defies the most basic principles of filmmaking for the sake of mood. So, unless you’re the kind of person who enjoys experimental films or is at least willing to let director Kyle Edward Ball take you on this strange journey, then you’ll likely lose patience with Skinamarink before the film even gets going.
Despite the low-quality visuals, the film does have a strange beauty to it. Made to appear as though it was shot on low quality film cameras, or perhaps even a worn VHS on playback, Skinamarink is a champion of the analogue aesthetic even though it was shot digitally. The same shots of the house are repeated frequently and there’s usually something different going on each time, though at first glance it may appear the same. The positions not only accentuate the creepiness of the house, but also are visually striking because of the way the light (or lack of it) plays with the environment and objects.
The greatest component of Skinamarink though is the audio. Akin to the video quality, the audio is low quality and unconventional. The majority of the film is silent, aside from a constant hiss from having the microphone gain up too high. This does mean though that the slightest noise is not only extremely loud, but also doesn’t sound anything like what it’s meant to sound like. Dialogue, what little there is, is often completely inaudible because it’s spoken in such a soft whisper, or it’s distorted beyond all recognition. Subtitles do accompany most of the dialogue, but honestly the film is way creepier when you’re just left wondering what was just said, particularly when it comes from the disembodied voice lurking in the darkness.
I have never seen a film like Skinamarink before, one that intentionally defies the most basic principles of filmmaking for the sake of mood. So, unless you’re the kind of person who enjoys experimental films or is at least willing to let director Kyle Edward Ball take you on this strange journey, then you’ll likely lose patience with Skinamarink before the film even gets going.
Despite the low-quality visuals, the film does have a strange beauty to it. Made to appear as though it was shot on low quality film cameras, or perhaps even a worn VHS on playback, Skinamarink is a champion of the analogue aesthetic even though it was shot digitally. The same shots of the house are repeated frequently and there’s usually something different going on each time, though at first glance it may appear the same. The positions not only accentuate the creepiness of the house, but also are visually striking because of the way the light (or lack of it) plays with the environment and objects.
The greatest component of Skinamarink though is the audio. Akin to the video quality, the audio is low quality and unconventional. The majority of the film is silent, aside from a constant hiss from having the microphone gain up too high. This does mean though that the slightest noise is not only extremely loud, but also doesn’t sound anything like what it’s meant to sound like. Dialogue, what little there is, is often completely inaudible because it’s spoken in such a soft whisper, or it’s distorted beyond all recognition. Subtitles do accompany most of the dialogue, but honestly the film is way creepier when you’re just left wondering what was just said, particularly when it comes from the disembodied voice lurking in the darkness.
Skinamarink is too long though. Coming in at around one hundred minutes, it’s hardly a long-winded affair. But because of the general absence of a clear storyline, and the frequent repetition of shots that show almost nothing, the film probably could have been around twenty to thirty minutes shorter, and the result would have been a far tighter and consistently terrifying ordeal.
A personal gripe I have is that I would have liked slightly more story. As it stands Skinamarink is almost open entirely to interpretation. How you understand certain lines of vague dialogue, or the way a hallway has been framed; trying to decipher true meaning from Skinamarink really is an exercise of grasping at straws. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as I love a story that makes me think. But you really are given so little to work with here that I feel like I’m making such wild leaps to make sense of the narrative.
Like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity before it, Skinamarink is a film that will split opinion between people who think it’s the scariest film they’ve ever seen, and people who really cannot understand how anyone could be scared by some dimly lit hallways. For me Skinamarink was truly terrifying, and I’m absolutely going to have trouble sleeping and walking around my house in the dark for some time to come.
I also love how the film was made on such a small budget and goes out of its way to be as experimental as it possibly can. Not everything it does it does well, but I’ve never seen anything like it before and that alone is worthy of my saying that Skinamarink is a must watch for horror or art house film fans. I’m never going to be able to look at a Fisher-Price telephone the same way ever again.
A personal gripe I have is that I would have liked slightly more story. As it stands Skinamarink is almost open entirely to interpretation. How you understand certain lines of vague dialogue, or the way a hallway has been framed; trying to decipher true meaning from Skinamarink really is an exercise of grasping at straws. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as I love a story that makes me think. But you really are given so little to work with here that I feel like I’m making such wild leaps to make sense of the narrative.
Like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity before it, Skinamarink is a film that will split opinion between people who think it’s the scariest film they’ve ever seen, and people who really cannot understand how anyone could be scared by some dimly lit hallways. For me Skinamarink was truly terrifying, and I’m absolutely going to have trouble sleeping and walking around my house in the dark for some time to come.
I also love how the film was made on such a small budget and goes out of its way to be as experimental as it possibly can. Not everything it does it does well, but I’ve never seen anything like it before and that alone is worthy of my saying that Skinamarink is a must watch for horror or art house film fans. I’m never going to be able to look at a Fisher-Price telephone the same way ever again.