Skinamarink is a film that does not work for me, yet I’m glad I watched it. It was an infuriating viewing experience but it provided valuable insight to me into the craft of employing horror effectively, because it failed so entirely in that exact aspect.
Okay, let me hold up a minute. I recognise that horror, perhaps alongside only comedy, is the most subjective genre in film. And some people fucking love Skinamrink. I get it, because I have fallen hook, line and sinker for some of the indie horror darlings of the past few years that have unfortunately come to be regarded as ‘elevated horror’ which, although critically adored, failed to find a broad audience. Even the most niche horror film has a place and has an audience. But I’m not the audience for this particular flick and I can tell you why.
Style over substance
Here’s the thing: Skinamarink is effective in fits and spurts (more on that later) but the key thing that it has going for it is it’s sense of style. Lo-Fi in every imaginable way; heavy film grain, visuals couched in shadows, old-school frayed audio-tracks, off-kilter camera angles, practically SD photography. It’s a vibe. And it’s incredibly effective…for about five minutes. Those opening five minutes are tense. But then that tension starts to fade as I realised that this is just the movie. And over the next 95 minutes those choices felt less like an effective means of communicating horror and more like an inexperienced film-student masking their lack of tradecraft with intentional obscurity. I believe in making the audience do some work but this is a movie that shows literally nothing of value. When you’re making you’re audience do all the work, you’re betraying the fact that film is a visual medium. Static shots of the creases where the walls meet the ceiling can be effective when used with consideration but when that sole shot makes up 30% of a movie, I can’t help but wonder whether the film-maker caught any focused coverage or just wandered around a house at night with a camera and is providing an exercise in B-footage editing rather than a genuine feature.
I understand that writer/director Kyle Edward Ball got his start in YouTube horror shorts but this is the key area where they overplay their hand and prove why extending a short concept to feature length doesn’t work. The tension and uneasiness that comes so naturally with a short film give way to frustration when an audience is given time and space to think about why what they’re being exposed to doesn’t work or, at worst (such as in Skinamarink), is boring, I realised 30 minutes in that I was bored because all I had seen was skirting boards and ceiling creases and as the film progresses, that doesn’t really change for the most part. Which leads to our next issue…
The faceless faceless
There are zero faces in this movie. This is not a hot-take or a snide aside. You literally never see an unobscured characters face throughout the entire running time of the movie. There are characters, who exist through POV shots and carefully framed shots of the back of heads, or of ankles stood awkwardly on carpets but faces? They are kept purposefully at arms length and the film suffers immensely for it. It might not be so bad if the principal characters in the film were capable of acting in a relatable manner but seeing as both the leads are fairly realistic four-to-five year olds, they lack any sense of agency throughout the story at all. Something occurred to me during Skinamarink which I had never really considered before: One of the purest elements of horror stories (cinema or otherwise) is that characters have their agency taken away from them and that is what we find the most frightening. By laser-focusing on characters that have not had a chance to develop a sense of agency, the story aims for a sense of universality based on personal previous shared experience but fails to recognise that the audience is not who they were when they were four or five years old. The experiences of the most vulnerable in our society do not necessarily translate to most adults who are watching this movie. This does not need to be a deal-breaker but the quickest, surest way to understand and empathise with a character is to see them and, in particular, see them emote with their face. By denying audiences this fundamental and basic communicative tool, Skinamarink only serves to distance them from the drama it seeks to exploit the entire time.
Fluidity of motion (or a lack thereof)
Skinamarink is made up, primarily, of static shots. Usually these static shots do not include any motion in them, save, perhaps, for the reflections of the refresh-rate of a CRT monitor (arguably the only reason Skinmarink is set in 1995). Due to the very distinctive and seemingly slow rate of lighting disparity due to these monitors, it seems like whenever there is motion in Skinamarink from any other source (a hand, foot, dropped teddy bear, etc.) it just looks wrong, as if we were watching a movie in a standard 24 fps that has suddenly been upgraded to a HFR format. The entire experience is utterly bizarre which is not in and of itself a deal-breaker, but only serves to distract from the tension and horror of the experience. Suddenly, I’m wondering why the film was shot the way it was. Whether that is a stylistic choice? Why the film relies so much on the lighting of a CRT, or whether the frame rates of public-domain cartoons is even slower than that of the apparent refresh rate of the screens they’re shown on, which must be lower than the 24 frames of film-stock that the film is presented in. If this were my third viewing of the film, these would be appropriate questions. On my first viewing, it just suggests that the horror isn’t landing.
It’s just kinda boring
It takes more than 30 minutes for the film to begin showing it’s hand, and once it does there are multiple sequences that are genuinely unsettling and bordering on the truly horrific. But those first 30 minutes are so unbelievably boring and unnecessary that I came extremely close to turning the film off entirely because there was no indication that the film was on track to do anything other than show abstract shots of domestic geography. In fact, that’s about all that the film actually did, but ultimately it managed to infuse those shots with some degree of meaning, but the first half an hour goes well beyond table-setting and just feels obnoxious. If that initial chunk of the movie were cut entirely, you would have a better movie but the tragedy is that despite the improved effectiveness of the remainder of the film, every inspired moment is bookended by excruciatingly boring periods of…nothing. It’s not set-up. It’s barely even a chance to catch your breath. There’s just so much nothing in Skinamarink that, once again, it shows a lack of discipline indicative of an attempt to extend a story in a style that is entirely appropriate to the short-story medium.
All the rest of it
I don’t want this review to go on forever so a brief summation of the rest of my frustrations:
- The actors are awful (may be made worse by their lack of facial exposure)
- The sound design is bad (scratchy aged audio tracks for background noise but no effects applied to prominent foreground sound, which felt disingenuous every time)
- Half the movie is public-domain cartoons (this is not even a joke)
- Every punch is pulled (there were so many moments where it felt like Skinmarink was pushing into a truly chilling directions and it just never seems to be brave enough to follow through with these impulses)
- Lack of cinematographic consistency (the film skits between first and third person which is fine but has a hard job delineating between whether it is a film that should commit to hard-cuts or fades. There is a really effective fade towards the end but the hard-cuts work best throughout most of the movie)
- It’s got all the problems of Blair With Project whilst simultaneously being basically diametrically opposed to the philosophy of the Blair Witch Project.
This isn’t even close to all of the problems I had with Skinamarink but it’s all I can muster the energy to focus on right now.
But all this said, I’m super glad I watched it. There are a lot of bad movies out there but most of them teach very few lessons. Let it be known that I think Skinamarink is a bad movie but it is the sort of bad movie that I learned so much from that I’m not especially frustrated at having watched. Watching Skinamarink and paying attention to it is an educational experience and one that I think most film-makers can get a lot out of if they pay attention. I don’t want the next five years to become carbon copies of this film but if amateur horror film-makers can pay attention to where Skinamarink falls short I would like to think that as far as low-budget indie horror flicks go we could have an incredibly promising period ahead for genre fare.
I consumed a lot of media this year and I’m going to rank my favourite pieces here. Rather than just doing a Film list, I’m also going to do a Games list and a short Music list.
2018. Guess we’ve just about made it, huh? I’m not gonna lie, there were a few times this year when I didn’t think I’d survive. One of those times was when I was stretchered off a mountain with a concussion and a busted hand. But most of the time, it was when I was caught in the middle of watching a generally terrible movie./cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/58655647/917575734.jpg.1518418829.jpg)
Here’s a simple exercise: display the media I consumed every month.
Here’s a simple exercise: display the media I consumed every month.
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Let’s not screw around here and start by laying some groundwork with a few declarative statements:
killpop 