Movie Reaction: Skinamarink

Formula: Paranormal Activity - the activity

 

Skinamarink is a movie I find hard to defend as a horror fan. I ultimately like the movie, but it is a test on an audience's patience that I understand anyone rejecting. This is a tiny horror movie made for $15,000 with used equipment. The footage is static-y. There's very little dialogue and most can barely be understood. Nearly every shot is a weird angle. It's a movie for people who found Paranormal Activity too fast-paced.

 

If you stick with it though, Skinamarink is a vibe and a vibe that's hard to shake. The best way I can describe it is this. Imagine you are a young child. You wake up in the middle of the night and the house is dark and quiet. Skinamarink is a movie about recreating that unsettling feeling you had in the moments before you ran to your parents' bed and told them you had a nightmare. And it is incredibly effective at recreating this feeling. It's a lot of stillness and darkness. Everything feels off-center and the rules of the world in the daylight just don't seem to apply anymore.

 

Where I land with the movie is this: It's more appetizer than main course. It is all mood without enough story to stand on its own. Skinamarink is a horror movie I'll watch to put me in the mood to watch another horror movie. That is something I'll almost certainly do in the future. It’s like how some people put on a favorite score to get them into the mood to write. I can see myself putting Skinamarink on to make Hell House LLC even more terrifying. I'm glad I did opt to see this movie uninterrupted on the big screen, but it will play best on Shudder at home. I saw the movie with a crowd of what appeared to be savvy horror-heads. We all seemed to get what the movie was doing, but there was a palpable sense of incompletion in our reaction at the end.

 

I do think everything in Skinamarink is intentional. The filmmaker did exactly what he intended. He used a tiny budget masterfully. The lack of payoff is the point of the movie. It aims to unsettle and unsettle it did. I certainly can't wait to see what the brain trust behind the film comes up with next. It is more experiment than film though, for better and worse.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend