Childhood nightmares are a uniquely powerful thing. I have a lot of nightmares a lot of the time for all manner of reasons, but none have stuck with me with as much staying power as the ones from my childhood.
Kyle Edward Ball has tapped into the innate fear at the heart of childhood nighttime anxieties with SKINAMARINK, an experimental found footage nightmare—and Ball’s debut feature—fresh off its world premiere at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival. SKINAMARINK‘s minimalism and lingering camerawork guarantee it will sink deep under your skin long after you’ve turned the lights back on and checked to make sure all your doors are still where they should be.
Jamie McRae’s cinematography transports audiences directly into the unusual and increasingly disturbing surroundings as seen by the terrified kids at the story’s center. We never see anyone’s faces; in fact we hardly ever see more than lower bodies, if anything, but we always feel as though we’re right next to them, their voices so close as to almost feel beneath the skin.
SKINAMARINK is about as unconventional-feeling a movie as you can make. It both defies classification and plants itself firmly in the horror realm from atmosphere alone, exploiting our worst collective intrusive anxiety thoughts and childhood fears, from being left alone at night with no parental comfort to the possible sinister monster under the bed…to that voice in your dreams you can’t quite seem to convince yourself wasn’t real.
Full disclosure for all it’s worth, I have, in fact, had a nightmare as a child with the exact voice of the presence in this film, and it remains such a vivid dream that I both remember exactly what it said and often struggle to firmly decide if it was really a dream or if my house just had a little something extra going on at the time. I’ve had enough paranormal experiences at other houses for either option to be a possibility, but it certainly enhanced the SKINAMARINK viewing experience beyond what I could ever have imagined.
The atmosphere created in this film is more than just immediately unsettling. It feels, as the situations get darker and bleaker, almost as if we are watching something we have no business laying eyes on. Like a fever dream you can’t quite shake. The children’s unease at being unable to find their parents and needing to cling to one another for safety is so raw, intimate, and universal an anxiety as to immediately set you on edge. And when the presence in their house grows more demanding and their trust of their own perceptions begins to fall under question, it’s horror in its most distilled form, under your skin and in your head long after the light from the screen goes black.
While its hour and 40 minute runtime has potential to be feel a bit overlong to some, given the film’s dread-filled pacing and unique filming approach, you may just as easily find yourself averting your eyes and squirming in your seat out of anxiety that the thing lurking among these children and twisting their environment to its will may finally reveal itself to be exactly the thing you feared most as a child, after all.
That SKINAMARINK is a debut feature is both mind-blowing and immensely exciting. Ball’s approach to making the familiar uncanny and unsettling through things we almost-see but have certainly felt, in some deep part of our psyches, is a masterful angle in a genre that is ripe for the picking when it comes to ways to get under your skin. If you ever wondered what House of Leaves might look like from the perspective of the children unable to keep a grasp on their surroundings, Ball has cracked the code of it and revealed an understated but deeply disturbing world, and proven himself a creator to watch along the way.
Tags: Dali Rose Tetreault, Fantasia Film Festival 2022, Film Festivals, Found-Footage, Haunted Houses, Horror, House of Leaves, Jaime Hill, Jamie McRae, Kyle Edward Ball, Lucas Paul, Ross Paul, Skinamarink
No Comments