The creepiest moments in the horror genre often come down to a single question provoked by slowly dawning terror; a certain degree, strategic or otherwise, of visual frustration; or a bit of both. Wait. What am I seeing here? That is the question.
With the Canadian nano-budget paranormal film “Skinamarink,” opening this week in theaters and streaming later this year on Shudder, the answer’s a bit of both, and the movie’s casting a spell more than it’s causing a lot of screams.
Writer-director Kyle Edward Ball’s hazy, grainy childhood reverie of nocturnal fear draws on memories and images familiar to millions (count me in!) whose early years were lit by the cold, clinical glow of a TV surrounded by a dark house. More directly “Skinamarink” comes from a 28-minute short film Ball made in 2020 called “Heck,” which led to this expanded 100-minute work after he crowdfunded $15,000 to make it happen.
So: What are we seeing, exactly, in the opening shot?
It’s tough to make out, with so much deliberate murk, but: two children, preteen siblings, Kevin and Kaylee, in their jammies, photographed obliquely (no faces, mostly ankles and feet) in the second-story hallway of their house. “Dad?” one asks, at a bedroom door. No answer. They go inside, find no one. The fixed shot is dominated visually by the carpet, of the 1995 variety. That’s the year Ball’s film, made in a single week in his childhood home in Edmonton, Alberta, takes place.
On the soundtrack, the nattering voices and impishly pushy music of an old cartoon from the ‘30s suggests the TV has been on, with someone asleep in the vicinity, for who knows how long. Not since “Poltergeist” has the family TV taken quite so prominent a role in a movie, though it’s important to frame expectations for this movie, so that adventurous audiences know what they won’t be getting, i.e., something grabby.
The kids’ father has apparently disappeared. We hear also of their mother, likewise out of the picture, but for a long time now, and for uncomfortably stated reasons. In their place, a trickster presence somewhere on the spectrum between “just messing with you” and pure, lethal malevolence, has entered the home. It communicates with the children in an otherworldly blur of a voice often requiring subtitles.
Ball plays a sly game of suggestion and intimation regarding the family in “Skinamarink.” We hear Dad on the phone at one point, facially obscured, speaking to someone about Kevin’s recent fall (if it was a fall) down a flight of stairs. As Kevin and Kaylee explore the house, they learn not to trust anything since everything has become scarily unfamiliar territory. The supernaturally flickering night light, controlled like everything else by the unseen force; rooms that turn entirely upside-down; this has the trappings of a classic haunting, but without the conventional narrative rhythms or a conventional narrative, period.
Ball borrowed the title from the 1980s theme song for the Canadian program “The Elephant Show.” “Skinamarink” can be described as a film about two kids whose father vanishes and whose house becomes an ever-shifting maze. But when the family toilet disappears and reappears at will, or windows and doors disappear altogether, it’s the simplest possible editing trick, and not really for shock effect. By my definition of a jump scare, Ball gives us exactly one. That’s about a million fewer than the industry average.
There are elements in the earlier short “Heck” that coalesce, or merely explain themselves, more clearly than “Skinamarink” wants in its experimental approach. Shot digitally and then manipulated for maximum fuzz, grain and a complex variety of darkness with some life to it, the movie is a patient exercise in teasing out some common nightmare themes. Is it the new “Paranormal Activity” or a “The Blair Witch Project” for the pandemic shut-in generation? No. But it’s not about that. It’s a low-fi rumination on inexplicable and gradually more threatening loneliness — the sort of childhood trauma typically explained to death by horror movies less interesting than this one.
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'SKINAMARINK'
3 stars (out of 4)
No rating (some violent images)
Running time: 1:40
How to watch: In theaters Friday; streaming on Shudder later in 2023
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