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| Courtesy of Mutiny Pictures |
After a year of horrors both real and imaginary and a month chock full of cinematic scare fests throughout this October including but not limited to Barbarian, Pearl, Smile and Terrifier 2, the month of terrorizing moviegoers comes to a close with one of the year’s most divisive yet wholly original lo-fi indie debut horror films: the sleepy supernatural after-hours creeper Skinamarink. While most think of the ‘skinamarinky-doo’ children’s song as well as kids programs ala Mister Rogers or Eureka’s Castle, documentary filmmaker Kyle Edward Bell in his first task as a writer-director seeks to revise our perception of such a delightful kiddie tune into that of nebulous fears of the unknown dark.
Experimental, grainy replete with print and audio damage with scratchings, the premise is exceedingly simple: two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their parents and all the windows leading outside of the house have disappeared. As the four-year-old’s Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) scope the house looking for their parents in between fiddling with toys and watching old cartoons on a CRT television with that distinctive flicker only TVs of that kind gave off at night, they become consciously aware of some sort of voice or entity that repeatedly calls to them. Soon, toys and belongings appear on the ceiling, the laws of gravity stop mattering and the interior of the house itself begins to change.
A bit like a Rorschach test on the eyes and ears, best absorbed in near total darkness with the sound cranked up, peppered throughout with scares both jumpy and starkly terrifying, Skinamarink is as close to being like a kid waking up in the middle of the night wandering about the house afraid of the dark as the movies have ever come. While deliberately slow and minimalist with frequent empty shots of hallways, carpets and windows which fluctuate in and out of reality, the sense of unease becomes so unshakable we’re sometimes locked in suspense without any action.
Sort of like a lo-fi live-action attempt at adapting Hideo Kojima’s ill-fated P.T.survival horror game to film, Kyle Edward Bell’s Skinamarink evokes that same implacable fear we get when we look at a wall or a corner of a room in the dark and think we see something looking back at us. Another additive to the experience of fear in our own home is the absence of music with the very audible presence of white noise and soft celluloid scratching on the soundtrack. Sounds of an inhuman voice radiating through the house play almost like a paranormal investigator’s supposed voice recordings of ghosts which, when heard through the fuzzy soundscape of white noise, are especially hair raising when heard here.
The kind of horror experience that has divided filmgoers in half with some finding the picture a past-midnight nightmare while others find its meanderings through dimly lit picture noise to be trying, Skinamarink (currently touring festival circuits) for my money brought me back to what it felt like to be a child waking up at night terrified of the darkness surrounding him. While prominently featuring toddlers onscreen whose fuzzy dialogue is sometimes subtitled, the film is aimed at adult viewers with moments that were more chilling than some of the loudest and goriest Hollywood thrillers recently released.
Yes this is a minimalist indie filmed inside a regular house but through subtle visual effects and reliance on darkness, the labyrinthine house becomes vast and easy to lose track of our whereabouts in. Easily one of the creepiest pictures of the year that managed to capture on film a distinctly childlike fear of the dark in the abstract, Skinamarink at the end of an already great year for horror movies is indeed something special.
–Andrew Kotwicki
