Picture this: You’re sitting in a cramped dorm room on a cold February night. Your flat is empty as everyone has gone away for the weekend. Everyone except you. You decide tonight’s the night for a horror film.
You grab some water, turn off the lights, hide your phone and put on Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink. For the next 100 minutes you’re subjected to what a true nightmare looks like.
That, in short, was my experience watching Skinamarink for the first time. I let myself get lost in the film’s experimental presentation, expecting nothing, only to be met with a film that’s haunted me for almost three years.
To understand why it stuck with me I’ll need to provide some background. When I was young, I was terrified of the dark. Most people experience the fear of the dark at some point, but it was a fear that stuck with me into my teenage years.
So going into Skinamarink I was expecting the typical haunted-house ghost story, but with the twist of kids being the central characters. Little did I know that it was basically tailor made to resurrect old fears in me.
Though the story does follow two young siblings trapped in their home that is under the influence of some kind of evil entity, the specifics were unknown to me before going in. For almost the entire run time the camera is fixed upon what surrounds the kids, not the kids themselves.
You’ll be shown a looping cartoon on an old TV set, or a wall that’s missing a window, but you’re never shown what’s really going on and that’s what hooked me.
“Show don’t tell”, is a phrase that’s thrown around a lot in horror, and it’s no different when it comes to Skinamarink. What’s shown is scary, but what’s not is even scarier.
There’s one scene where the oldest sibling, a young girl, ventures upstairs because a voice told her that her parents are upstairs. You can hear her footsteps approach the door, but the camera never tracks her.
She enters her parents bedroom and finds her mother sitting on the bed, she faces away from the camera during the entire scene. The slow dread that’s built for thirty minutes prior crescendos as the young girl hears something horrible happening in the cupboard whilst she looks underneath the bed.
Wihtout revealing all the details, that scene is a stand out amongst many others in the film. It’s the only time Kyle Edward Ball gives an obvious scare for the audience to enjoy. However, the horror doesn’t end there.
Most of the film takes place in the dark. The only light the siblings are given is the humming glow of their TV set, an item which the entity haunting them loves to manipulate. There’s no waiting for the morning light to come or turning on a lamp for the kids; they’re stuck in a nightmare which refuses to let go of them.
The dark mixing with nightmares is something I’m all too familiar with. I used to have recurring nightmares when I was younger which would paralyse me even after I woke. I would be stuck laying down in the dark, unable to move out of fear because I felt that there was something behind me waiting to grab me.
I’m sure everyone’s got some kind of experience like that, but Skinamarink made me feel that same fear I conquered when I was 12 at the age of 20. No other film has provoked the same emotional response from like Skinamarink did.
That’s what is important about horror media as a whole. It’s a genre that can provide endless entertainment, but it can also open up memories that you lost years ago. That being said I’ll never watch Skinamarink again, I don’t need another year of sleepless nights.
Featured Image Credit: Shudder
Fourth year Film and Journalism student
Deputy editor
Contact - deputyeditor@brignews.com
