There’s always an expectation that you’re seeking out the taboo with horror. The desire to bear witness to something you ‘shouldn’t’ be seeing likely exists in all of us, and cinema offers an opportunity to explore the vast realms of the ghastly and grisly from a distance. With that expectation comes the understanding that this relationship can only go so far. The filmmaker puts your deepest, darkest fears on screen, and you confront them, almost like exposure therapy, knowing what you’re seeing can’t really hurt you. Sometimes, however, a film transcends the boundaries of cinema or art and becomes a transmission of sorts. You’re sitting there, eyes glued to the fuzzy screen late at night, convinced pure evil emanates from its glow. Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and its sickening daylight butchery comes to mind. Cannibal Holocaust felt so real that director Ruggero Deodato was arrested by Italian authorities and had to prove it was a piece of fiction. The Blair Witch Project caused a similar wave of terror in 1999, its found footage authenticity inspiring water cooler chatter over whether it was ‘real.’ These films burrow underneath your skin, deep into your soul, and the unease that washes over you is paralyzing.
What those films all have in common is that they captured a dread that felt vital and new. They weren’t necessarily the first of their kind, but their images coalesced into something beyond cinema. Something paralytic and sickening. Pulling something like this off in 2023 when it feels everything’s been done takes a special talent, but that’s exactly what Kyle Edward Ball does with Skinamarink. To try and describe what exactly Skinamarink is about is wasted energy. A brother and sister are up late at night when their father suddenly disappears. Then the doors to the house disappear. That’s essentially it, but Skinamarink is less about what happens than how it’s happening. A vibe, as they say. That vibe is something I’m not sure I’ve experienced before. Maybe it was the post-Covid brain fog still swirling around my head, but Skinamarink felt like I was being pulled into the screen by an insidious lull. Like something familiar residing in the deep recesses of my psyche had woken up but wasn’t quite right anymore. It scared the hell out of me.
The calming, deeply familiar pull of Skinamarink is where that uncomfortable sense of evil lies. I have suffered from wicked bouts of insomnia since I was a child. I also was lucky enough to have an old, halfway-decent TV in my bedroom at a young age. Many nights, my little mind couldn’t stop racing, and I’d flip through basic cable channels stumbling upon old cartoons and infomercials. The line between reality and my dream space would often blur. And in that haze are half-formed memories of Woody Woodpecker’s dissonant laugh echoing off my walls, blue light encompassing me as I’d drift off. As you sit with these children, that feeling rushes back, and you’re a kid again lying by the TV. Enveloped by darkness but shielded by the soft glow reflecting off of you. There’s a warmth in those memories of youth that Ball unearths like a balm, but as you sit in the fuzzy glow of this house, something darker scratches at the back of your mind.
Everything feels bigger when you’re a child. People, places, and spaces all tower over you like alien beings you can’t quite wrap your head around. In those long, sleepless nights, every once in a while, something would scare me enough to seek my parents out. I’d tiptoe to my door, but the minute I opened it, the darkness of the house swallowed me whole. The vague outline of their door disappeared down a hallway that never felt this long and narrow during the day. How could this place, my home, feel so alien? By virtue of playing in whatever worlds I’d imagined with action figures and dolls, I knew every nook and cranny of my house, but under the dark of night, that familiarity turned to a cold, oppressive black. Is something moving in the distance? Is that towel peeking out from the hall closet near the bathroom an arm beckoning me? Did I just hear someone call my name? In that frozen panic, your mind plays tricks on you and your only solace exists somewhere past the darkness in a door that’s simply no longer there.
This is what Skinamarink accomplishes. It’s the cinematic version of a long night spent by the warmth of the TV being swept away by inky darkness and stumbling through an eternal hallway. The long, static shots on canted angles with only legs or ceilings visible are a transmission from your youth, but these aren’t your memories. No, what you’re seeing are the memories of the thing you thought was watching you in the darkness. As these two tiny kids are pulled around the house by a voice that sometimes replicates their mother, maybe their father, but often demonic, you’re never on steady ground. Sometimes you’re under a couch. Other times, you’re focused on a Barbie impossibly hanging above. As you’ve been tricked, like these kids, into settling into the sounds of a quiet night, evil’s been stalking you, and now it has something to show you.
Skinamarink stops feeling like a movie and moves into something plucked from somewhere else. That immediately places it into the legendary echelon of evil transmissions. Perhaps even beyond those. Cinema is an act of voyeurism. There’s always something a little unseemly about peering into the lives of strangers. That’s why many of the best filmmakers, especially those specializing in horror, feel so transgressive. They tap into an innate sense of curiosity to peer into places we maybe shouldn’t. It feels like getting away with something. What made me feel so uneasy during Skinamarink is that my role in this age-old transaction felt both upended and wrong. After being gently pulled into tones and visions of my past, I didn’t initially realize that I slowly stopped being the viewer and that whatever was pumping this into my brain might, in fact, be watching me. I wasn’t just watching a movie. I felt like I was viewing a reality wherein whatever existed in the darkness on the way to my parents’ room had finally found me after all these years.
It’s a terrifying prospect that I haven’t really shaken off yet. Every once in a while, I’ll catch something off in the periphery. It could’ve been my cat. Maybe that Covid brain fog is still causing my sleepy vision to blur. Whatever it is, it’s probably best not to look under my bed for a little while longer.
