Have you ever lay in bed at night in near darkness, staring at a strange object in the corner of your room, convinced it’s shifting shape, moving towards you, coming to life? Skinamarink — a brilliant, low-budget horror —taps right into that. Shot over the course of seven days in director Kyle Edward Ball’s actual childhood home, it’s an unsettlingly quiet film that transforms the most mundane of spaces and objects into a subject of terror.
The year is 1995, and two young siblings — Kevin and Kaylee — wake in the middle of the night to find that their father is missing and all the windows and doors in their house have disappeared. But the impressionable children are too young to understand the situation, or know who to trust. So when a croaking voice from an unknown space starts calling for them — asking their names, directing them to commit unspeakable acts of violence against themselves — they bend to its will.
The film premiered earlier this year at Fantasia Festival in Canada, with critics calling it everything from “indescribable” to “cursed [and] birthed from the subconscious”.
Horror cinema often relies on two ways of scaring us: either they double down on the quick, jolting jump scares (murderous beings appearing from nowhere), or they trade in imagery so terrifying that they’re burned into your brain (think a stranger lingering ever so faintly in the background). Skinamarink does interesting things with both, with the two forms — often mutually exclusive in horror cinema — twisting into each other, as if one wouldn’t work without the other.
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The film spends long periods of time — often for what feels like several minutes — with the camera pointed at a seemingly uneventful space: the corner of a ceiling or an old TV set playing a 1930s cartoon stuck on repeat, for example. Nothing changes, but that prolonged period of staring into numbing oblivion forces your brain to play tricks on you and creeps into your subconscious. Think of it like sitting in total silence with someone you don’t know well.
The jump scares are scarce — you could probably count them on one hand, but that too plays into the film’s effectiveness. Those long spells of silence are stabbed through with a shriek, or, in one scene, the fucked up actions of a Fisher Price toy phone.
This constant sense of quiet, while some heinous events happen off screen, make Skinamarink more disturbing than your standard Friday night popcorn movie fare. It requires a little patience, but once it’s found its way to bury itself beneath your skin, you’ll find it dangerously hypnotic, macabre, and hard to shake.
‘Skinamarink’ is in select UK and US cinemas now, and available to stream via Shudder later in 2023.