Picture this. You wake up sometime in the morning, it’s still dark out. You can’t really see anything in your dark bedroom, but in the corner of your room you swear you see something staring back at you. You don’t know what it is, you’re not even sure if it’s real. But it does feel like there’s something there, hiding in the shadows. Waiting, watching.
This is the fear that the new Canadian horror film Skinamarink leans into. The first feature by Edmonton-based director Kyle Edward Ball (who also runs a YouTube account called Bitesized Nightmares), this was an entirely crowdfunded film made on a budget of $15,000. It was based on a common shared nightmare many people had as children. You wake up in the dark, your parents are missing, and there’s a monster somewhere in the house. This film takes that basic premise and runs with it. 4 year old Kevin (played by Lucas Paul) and his 6 year old sister Kaylee (played by Dali Rose Tetreault) wake up to find neither of their parents are around. It looks like the doors and windows have disappeared, letting no light in.
The two play some cartoons on an VHS player to give them light and comfort, and search throughout the house for their parents. But they find something lurking in the house, something malevolent. The two children don’t fully understand what’s happening, leaving them at the mercy of whatever is hiding in the house.
Shot in the director’s childhood home, the majority of this film exists in the negative space. What that means is most of the film is close-ups of areas of the house, such as a tv screen or a missing door, while the action happens off-screen. We don’t actually see that much of Kevin and Kaylee, mostly just their feet as they walk through the shot. Most of the lighting comes from tv screens or nightlights, keeping the characters and viewer quite literally in the dark. And the film is shown via grainy footage, making it look like the strangest found footage film in a long time (even though it technically isn’t a found footage film). We hear more of what happens than we actually see it, making those few shots where we see the action painfully intense.
Tapping into a feeling many have experienced for its basic premise makes this film feel truly terrifying while doing so little. The film engages in the tropes of the slow cinema genre, it’s made up of mostly long takes that do more to establish a tone than explain what is happening. That’s part of what makes this viewing experience so scary, we’re never 100% sure of what is going on. Even during some of the film’s more horrifying moments, it’s unclear if they’re actually happening. We’re just left with the feelings of what has been implied. There is truly nothing scarier than the fears our own mind creates, and Skinamarink taps into our own nightmares by doing so little.
The director’s YouTube channel focuses predominantly on recreating nightmares as submitted by viewers, giving him tons of experience to draw on in the creation of Skinamarink. The truly scariest thing about nightmares aren’t the specific things that happen in them, but the feeling of them. Skinamarink oozes this unsettling fear, calling back to films like Eraserhead and the Blair Witch Project. We see images and experience feelings we recognize, but not used for comfort. The nostalgia of the setting is twisted into taking those comforting vibes and distorting them just enough to make the viewer tremble with anticipatory dread.
What really heightens the feeling of dread is the sense that the two children are also victims of abuse. While they certainly go through the ringer in this film, the film implies both kids have been abused. When things start getting strange in the house, they don’t try to run away. They venture further, possibly because they’re used to horrible things happening. They don’t try to run until it’s far too late, possibly because they believe their running could make things worse.
Skinamarink is a revolution in horror filmmaking. By using minimalist imagery, long takes and coasting on tone more than plot, the film has the ability to terrify in a much more universal manner then your average ghost or slasher film. This is a film best watched in either a sold-out cinema at midnight, or alone in your bedroom with the lights off. It’s available to stream now on Shudder, this films gets a 5/5.
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