"Skinamarink" Challenges You to Watch a Movie without Looking at Your Phone
It's not a film. It's a test...
When I was a kid, maybe six or seven years old, I had a nightmare that will stay with me until the day I die. I was alone in the house at night. I would walk from room to room looking for anybody — anything — that was familiar. I had better find them soon, because I had the feeling that somewhere in the darkness was an unfriendly presence, and it was closing in on me.
Skinamarink Director Kyle Edward Ball claims to have had this dream also, as have many others he has talked to over the years. It seems to be a ubiquitous dream, like falling or standing naked in public. Unlike these other shared flights of the collective unconscious, however, which appear suddenly and jolt you awake, this dream is one you experience for what seems an eternity. When you wake up, it is not with a jerk, but a slow fluttering of the eyelids. You lay there for a while in the dark, your eyes adjusting to the same environment as your dream, and a sense of foreboding engulfs you. Are you still asleep?
In Skinamarink, now streaming on Shudder and playing in theaters (don’t see it in an auditorium next to Avatar!), Ball attempts to reproduce the horrors that lurk in our unconscious minds — especially those of our childhood, when we have deep-seated fears of everything we know either being taken away from us, or turning on us.
Kevin and Kaylee are our proxies — two children who wake up in their nondescript suburban home one night in 1995 to find their father is missing and there are no longer any windows. Doors and their thresholds are in a constant state of flux, as are fixtures, appliances, and toys. Like a demented Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, the house is alive. Action figures walk around by themselves, and toilets talk. The children’s initial confusion gives way to panic, and then a fruitless search for comfort. They hunker down in the living room and make it their headquarters. Their only light is the cool, staticky buzz coming from the television set, which plays a constant stream of public domain cartoons from the ‘30’s and ‘40’s. Eventually, an ominous voice in the dark compels Kevin and Kaylee to leave their safe base, providing them with cryptic messages and tasks they must complete, because, in the belly of this particular beast, what else can they do?
The summary I’ve given above is just about the only conventional thing this small, weird, $15,000 movie has going for it, and it’s what you know before it starts. It’s one of those movies that trolls you with its premise, and then tests your will to just watch something — do one thing only — for one hundred straight minutes. They could seriously make a game show out of this one.
Ball gives us some horror tropes to hold onto. There are a few jump scares to be had, yes, but, for the most part, Skinamarink gives you little in the way of convention, or anything else you’re used to seeing in a narrative feature. For one, you never see the full figures of either character. You see hands, feet, and torsos, and you only see one face for a quick half second (actually, you don’t even see all of that). There is some dialogue, but it is often spaced-out minutes apart. Sometimes, the words are so meagerly uttered that subtitles appear. But even these words are so dissociated from the characters’ identities that it is like listening to the computer in Wargames emulate speech.
While watching, I kept wondering: who is this movie made for? It’s difficult to imagine anyone with a TikTok account watching. With long stretches of electric jitter, it definitely has the DNA of David Lynch, but even the hardest of Eraserheads need some narrative pull and quirky, oddball hijinks every now and then. I had the thought about five minutes in that Skinamarink may be an experiment in making a feature-length film of ASMR, that YouTube trend of fifteen-hour long videos where influencers run their fingers through hairbrush bristles. Actually, the film is an example of “analog horror”, an offshoot of found footage films and Internet Creepy pastas like “Slenderman”. It is an extremely niche subgenre for millennials who grew up in the twilight days of cathode-ray tubes and VCRs, before the whole world went online and, ironically, splintered into a million little pieces. The horror of this horror trend, I suppose, is that an analog video tape, after so many uses, takes on a life of its own. Unlike the clear high-definition image to which we’ve become so accustomed, the tape will distort over time. Sounds will change, and images will “ghost”. Watching an old tape can take on the effect of staring into a void, where meaning is derived from the positive or negative energy of your own soul. Or something like that.
The race to recapture the golden age of low-fi white noise has completely passed me by, even though I’m supposedly it’s primary audience. I remember all too well the days when I had to adjust the tracking more than the volume, for instance. But I’ve been completely ignorant of analog horror until watching Skinamarink Friday night. I think this may be because the true audience for it is actually a few years behind me — those folks who grew up with DVDs and Blu-Ray fully realized, and who became educated with the low-fi qualities of analog through filters on Snapchat and Instagram. They embrace this old school technology the same as retro games and Polaroid cameras they buy at Urban Outfitters. It’s because they know they have options. Through technology, they can visit the past at will, and come back to the land of 4K when they get bored.
I think the terror of Skinamarink, then, is derived from Kevin and Kaylee’s utter helplessness and inability to escape this analog world. And for the most part, it works. Ball’s camera understands how our eyes work in the dark, forcing our focus to create menacing shapes out of everyday objects. His microphone compensates for the visual deficits with loud streams of electronic hum, the white noise we ignore in the normal throws of our day, but which, in the pitch dark of silent night, stirs in our brains like bees. Ultimately, the desensitization you experience in the windowless house becomes a metaphor for the lack of connection and context the Internet, for better or worse, provides us to make sense out of the senseless. If you can indeed avoid reaching for your phone to scroll Instagram or pause to go to the bathroom and get another beer, Skinamarink may very well lull you into a hypnotic trance not unlike the sleep of your childhood that was capable of producing for you terrifying, yet compelling, dreamscapes.
I was thrilled to see Skinamarink end, though that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. Like any compelling nightmare, I wanted to sit with it for a minute or two, and connect the logic of my consciousness with the illegibility of its dreams. But I couldn’t, and that’s the one inherent flaw of the film. In the end, it’s a simulation of an organic experience we can no longer have, where we’re not entitled to context, and immediately knowing everything about everything. It’s not Kyle Edward Ball’s fault, but it made me a little sad when my first reaction to the film’s ending was the same as when I wake up from a dream: to shrug it off, and reach for my phone.