Horrorfest 2023: Skinamarink

Skinamarink

Written and directed by Kyle Edward Ball

Starring Lucas Paul, Dali Rose Tetreault, Ross Paul and Jaime Hill

Canada, 2023

Now we've got the opposite case with these modern films -- a movie I wanted to see and thought looked good that turned out not being so great. A friend of mine told me it was slow moving and I thought to myself, "So what? Some of my favorite movies are slow!"

As far as I can tell from having watched the movie, SKINAMARINK is the tale of a couple kids lost in a house where their parents have either disappeared or reappeared as untrustworthy monsters, only to disappear again. Also the doors, windows and toilet disappear, but also reappear. There's a disembodied voice that talks to the kids, one kid eventually disappears and then it's over. We're told at the outset that this takes place in the 90s, though that has no bearing on anything that happens, and the film is presented via footage that has been digitally altered to appear grainy. All of the shots are off-center half-shots of parts of the house, avoiding ever focusing on the children or centering anything in the frame, except a toy phone or cartoons on the television.

That's what I got from watching it. If you go online and read about it I guess others understand exactly what happened in great detail and will list it out for you, but I don't know where they're getting all that. Maybe they read a press book.

As the 100-minute movie unfolded before me I began to think that, actually, if I had come across this movie in some other way, I might enjoy it and find it scary. As an example, if it was just some weird video on YouTube and no one knew where it came from or why it was there, and I clicked to watch it, I'd probably sit there in rapt suspense wondering what was up, even if I suspected it was a put-on. But, knowing this is a feature length theatrical release and I'm just watching it on Hulu really puts a damper on things for a movie of this style. Instead of being intrigued by its weirdness, I sat there wondering about all the choices. For instance, there's no in-movie explanation as to why it is shot this way -- it's not a found footage movie, so the fact that it plays out as if it's someone scrolling through poorly aimed security cameras has no reason for existing other than style, and that makes me sit there wondering what the director was getting at instead of enjoying the movie.

I was not shocked to learn that the director started by making spooky videos on YouTube. Suddenly it all made sense. That's why this plays as an overly long weird internet video. Unfortunately. the weird internet videos that work mostly work because they're mercifully short. That's why they're not movies.

As I watched the movie it began to remind me of a Horrorfest alum, ALICE -- a strange blend of live action and stop motion from Czechoslovakia that retells the tale of ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND in a dirty abandoned house with lots of creaky, unsettling sound effects and one lone girl (Alice, as played by Kristyna Kohoutova) making her lonely way through all of it. At the time I said the movie was not so much scary as it is weird and unexplained and that the images and sounds stick with you after a viewing. If I had seen it when I was 8, I reasoned, it would have disturbed me.

SKINAMARINK almost gets to that point, but its familiarity as a visual form of "creepy pasta" holds it back. ALICE has the distinction of being unlike anything that came before or since, which makes its strange and unexplained nature work, and makes you say "How and why did this get made?" With SKINAMARINK you just think, "Oh yeah, I've seen stuff like this on the internet. They're being weird and unexplained on purpose as a shorthand for being creepy."

Part of this might be jealousy. As a youngster who wanted to make movies and was wowed with the indie successes of the likes of Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez, I always hoped I'd stumble on a simple, easy-to-produce, cheap idea that would catapult me to success. However, I guarantee you if I had simply set my camera up in various rooms of my childhood home and made creepy off-screen noises for 100 minutes, absolutely no one would have considered it a work worthy of watching for free, let alone paying to watch in a movie theater. So what's special about this one that captures people? Right place, right time? Or, is it like BLAIR WITCH and I'm just on the other side of it -- back when that came out, I echoed its praises while others said it sucked.

To be fair, I wouldn't say this movie sucks. If anything, it shows the filmmaker has a ton of promise and whatever they make next is likely to be at least interesting, which is more than can be said about most movies.