Skinamarink Horror Movie – Despite comparisons to Blair Witch and Eraserhead and a terrifying premise, this atmospheric debut film ends
His experimental lo-fi horror debut became a mini-viral sensation last year after being accidentally leaked online. Terrorized TikTok users called it “the scariest movie ever made”; critics reached for comparisons to The Blair Witch Project and David Lynch’s Eraserhead. I have to admit I’m underwhelmed and think Skinamarink is a bit undeserving of its newly acquired cult status.
Skinamarink Horror Movie
That said, there is undoubtedly something eerie, almost séance-like, in the way Canadian filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball evokes childhood fears of the dark. The primal horror of being little and waking up in the middle of the night, your imagination plays tricks on you, turning the hallway to mom and dad’s room into a terrifying no-man’s land where monsters lurk.
Skinamarink Trailer: The Creepiest Horror Movie Trailer Of The Year
The film is set in 1995, presumably so that Ball and his cinematographer Jamie McRae could give it an eerie analog feel, filming in atrocious night vision. Ball made the film for $15,000 in his childhood home; it takes place in a house where four-year-old Kevin (Lucas Paul) and his older sister Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) wake up to find that their parents have disappeared. Seen with children’s eyes in the dark, the house looks alive. The windows seem to disappear and become eerie black canyons of nothingness; the railings weave and jut out at frightening angles.
These pictures can take you back to your childhood. But there are a lot of them, accompanied by numbingly abrasive lines whispered by the kids, like “I can’t fall asleep with the lights on.” It’s atmospheric and becomes increasingly ominous with the arrival of a bogeyman. “Kaylee didn’t do as she was told,” he growls menacingly. “So I removed her mouth.” Is he an intruder or, more worryingly, their father? At this point we get a ghostly look at Kaylee. Otherwise, we don’t see the children’s faces – just a single pajama leg whizzing by.
Skinamarink has an interesting origin story. Ball started with a YouTube channel where he collected nightmares that people shared in the comments section, which he then turned into short films. The inspiration for Skinamarink was a recurring bad dream – different people described the same dream. The result is an impressive feat of technical achievement, but rather repetitive. I wasn’t convinced it had enough ideas to stretch beyond 10 minutes. In the end I was more bored than scared. Made on a $15,000 budget, Canadian director Kyle Edward Ball’s lo-fi horror film Skinamarink has become something of a sensation, now earning $1.9 million at the box office.
This success is all the more impressive given the highly experimental nature of the film itself, which eschews conventional narrative and instead focuses on being a purely experiential piece of film meant to evoke the feeling of being in a dark house as a child.
Skinamarink’ Review: This Isn’t Like Other Horror Movies
The official synopsis (from IMDb) takes place in 1995 as follows; “Two children wake up in the middle of the night to find that their father has disappeared and that all the windows and doors in their home are gone.” And it really is.
Named after the Canadian children’s song, Skinamarink has a real sense of eeriness about it that feels a bit like a half-remembered childhood nightmare. The film unfolds entirely through long, sometimes static shots punctuated by a few jumping moments as the two children, Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), explore the house and decide to sleep downstairs. Toys are strewn on the floor, objects begin to disappear. A television playing old cartoons is constantly on in the background, providing a familiar but also dissonant soundtrack, and the film’s minimal dialogue is intentionally muted, with Ball using subtitles.
Expanded from YouTuber Ball’s 2020 short film Heck, the result is a strange little film; one that has a premise but no real plot, with Ball instead focusing on capturing the very specific feeling of being a little kid and waking up in the middle of the night and heading out of your bedroom to explore the dark house with no one around. It’s a uniquely eerie feeling that everyone has felt, and Ball does a fantastic job of capturing it in his stripped-down, analog-inspired style.
Ball’s film, shot in his childhood home in Edmonton, unfolds mainly through grainy shots of the house at night, evoking old home movies (it was shot digitally by cinematographer Jamie McRae), with long takes showing dimly lit hallways and attics, where the camera deliberately hides many details. These odd angles are intentional and give the feeling that something is off. Apart from a few shots of feet walking down carpeted corridors, the main characters are also not seen and much of the film is presented from their perspective.
Chancellor! And His Art~ — Skinamarink!
While Skinamarink is probably best described as something akin to an arthouse riff on “found footage” horror films like Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project, it’s also a film that you can’t really do justice to in writing because it was made simply had to be experienced on a sensory level. Sometimes it even feels more like a collection of images that could be projected onto a gallery wall, made to evoke a feeling when you stand there and look at them. Because of this, I think the film could have been more impactful if it had been clocked closer to eighty minutes, rather than its somewhat inflated 100 minute running time.
While I don’t know if it really works as a conventional feature film, Skinamarink gets points for being its own thing and is often uniquely effective as an experiment and as an experience. On those terms, the film succeeds in what it sets out to do, with Ball capturing the strange, unsettling middle-of-the-night feel very effectively, and the final shots have a truly haunted and demonic feel that’s hard to shake. Maybe Ball really did channel something after all.
Skinamarink is now playing in cinemas and will be available to stream exclusively on Shudder from February 2nd. follows two children – Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) – after they wake up in the middle of the night to find their father gone and all the windows and doors in their house gone.
The experimental film, Ball’s debut film, premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival in July before it was pirated from another festival’s home viewing platform and began circulating online. It became a viral sensation on TikTok and Reddit, with some viewers describing it as the scariest movie they’d ever seen.
Skinamarink And Claustrophobia
Leaking online was a double-edged sword, according to Ball. “I am not happy that it has been leaked. Getting it pirated at first was a nightmare and it caused conflicting feelings in me, he told RogerEbert.com. “But when someone sees my movie — whether it’s in theaters or streaming on Shudder or they pirated it — and they love it, I can’t help but be glad they loved it, right?”
Hits theaters on January 13 – ahead of a subsequent streaming debut on Shudder – as it looks to follow in the grand tradition of micro-budget horror films that have left their mark on the genre.
In legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock’s arguably most famous film, most of the violence takes place off-screen. This, along with Hitchcock’s decision to defer the director’s fee in exchange for a 60% share of the film’s profits, allowed
To be made on the modest budget of $800,000 ($8 million today). It would go on to earn over $32 million ($390 million today) at the box office.
Why Scary New Movie ‘skinamarink’ Will Make You Fear The Dark
Was the first major mainstream film to tap into the fear of the monster within, according to James Kendrick, an associate professor of film and digital media at Baylor University who is an expert on horror.
“Suddenly, horror isn’t this clearly coded vampire in a castle in Transylvania. It’s not a hideous monster. It’s not a werewolf. It’s not something obvious,” he shared in 2020. “It’s the relatively benign guy behind the counter at The roadside motel was turned into a monster by his own mother’s perversions.”
Working on a shoestring budget of $114,000 ($960,000 today), writer-director George A. Romero delivered a groundbreaking film that created horror’s famous zombie subgenre and continues to inspire countless imitators to this day.
, at face value, is a film about a group of people trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. But it’s also filled with social commentary on 1960s American society, features the horror genre’s first black lead (Duane Jones as Ben), and, having grossed over $30 million ($252 million today), still stands as a of the most successful independent films ever made.
How Can I Watch Skinamarink?
Was a sheer carnage that launched a quarter billion dollar franchise. With a budget of less than $140,000 ($831,000 today), the film’s 32-day shoot in the sweltering Texas summer heat was by all accounts miserable.
“Everyone hated me by the end of the production,” director Tobe
Horror movie watching blanket, horror movie wall art, horror movie socks, horror movie dvds, horror movie blanket, horror movies full movie, horror movie merch, horror movie christmas ornaments, horror movie diamond painting, horror movie legos, horror movie pack, horror movie hooded blanket
