Yesterday morning, I decided to finally watch a movie that's been very controversial and divisive among horror fans:
Skinamarink.
I won't lie, I really hadn't heard much of anything positive about this movie, but I'd always been curious about it, and my love of anything dreamcore and liminal wouldn't let me leave it alone. When I saw it was finally available to watch on Hulu, I was excited to finally see it, although I wasn't expecting much based on reviews I've seen.
I will start this off by saying, I can most definitely understand why people wouldn't like it. It's shot in a very different sort of way, all angles of spaces in the house, with the characters never really being seen or having real dialogues, and I can see how that would be off-putting to viewers. But, as someone who loves eerie imagery, particularly of the liminal and nightmarish variety, I was loving the strange shots.
What I wasn't expecting to love, though, was the movie itself. And I have to say, I am so glad that I gave it a chance, because this movie resonated with me in a way I don't think any other movie could.
Skinamarink doesn't have much of a story to it, per se, but it's seen from the point of view of young siblings Kaylee and Kevin. We hear their father on the phone toward the beginning of the movie, saying Kevin has fallen down the stairs, likely the result of sleepwalking, and the night continues on in a strange, unsettling way as Kevin and Kaylee wake up to realize that the windows and doors in their house have gone missing, and their parents, first their father, don't seem to be anywhere around, either.
The night plays out like a nightmare, with the two siblings trying to distract themselves with cartoons and toys, like Legos and a beloved stuffed animal, as the presence of strangeness and unease in the house closes in on them.
What the movie is actually meant to represent, and what actually happens to Kevin and Kaylee, and their parents, for that matter, is largely left open to interpretation. I've seen many say that it's a metaphor for child abuse and trauma, while many others believe it should simply be taken at face value as a horror film about a demonic entity taking control over a home and the lives of the family within it. Is it real? Is it truly just a nightmare?
That's really up to the viewer.
I'm not sure what camp I fall into about what the movie is meant to represent, personally. I feel as though each theory has merit within itself...I found myself questioning at times whether it was all Kevin's coma fantasy after falling down the stairs, and I also found myself wary of the parents and their actions toward the children, for what little we see of them. Maybe upon another viewing, I'll have a different interpretation. But for right now, what I really want to talk about is what this movie did for me, specifically, and why I think it will resonate with people who were certain types of kids.
Kevin is four years old in this movie, and when I myself was four, I had my one and only, at least that I can recall, experience with sleepwalking. I obviously don't remember every detail, but what I do remember is walking out into the hallway from my room, and looking up at the top of the wall unit in the living room, where a Minnie Mouse doll of mine was laying. (It was one of my most favorite toys of the moment but had a heavy, hard head, so I was not allowed to have it in bed with me for fear it would injure me in the middle of the night.) All I kept thinking through the beginning of Skinamarink, with the strangely angled shots of the house, was how much it looked like what I saw when I'd been sleepwalking. I remember very little else about that night, only that I woke up in a pile of stuffed animals at the end of my bed, and was now, newly, terrified of the dark. A nightlight was installed in my room before the next day was over, and to this day I haven't gone back to sleeping in total darkness, and I doubt I ever will. I believe my fear of blindness began that night as well, which made the moment in the movie when the demonic entity instructs Kevin to stick a knife in his eye all the more terrifying. There was a part of me, crazy as it sounds, that couldn't help but wonder, Did that happen to me, too?
Even aside from that strange sleepwalking adventure, the movie continued to pull me back to my childhood. I know I've mentioned before that I was a total scaredy-cat as a child, and nights were often particularly hard for me, if I had some spooky image or train of thought locked in my brain. I had a habit of getting up at odd hours of the night and, not leaving my room, but opening my door and looking both ways down the hall, as if about to cross the street, to make sure nothing was out there. (Not sure what I thought I was going to do if anything was, honestly.) This reminded me again of a shot from the movie. But even on the nights that I didn't move from my bed, the things my terrified, paranoid mind could do were truly amazing at times. I would lay there imagining scenarios very much like what Kaylee and Kevin endured in the movie. There was one specific night I remember, where I truly believed everyone in my house had died and I was the only one left. There were also nights during which I thought I had died, and was now a ghost, often trying to test putting my hand through the wall. There was a knot in the wood of my closet door that made the wood pattern look like a face, which, in the middle of the night, I interpreted as a disfigured man and could swear he was telling me, Go to sleep!, very much like what happened with Kevin in the movie. My mind played every trick imaginable on me, when I was awake at night, and for the hour and forty minutes or so that I was immersed in the world of Skinamarink, I felt as though I was that child again. Locked into my fears, in this strange after-dark world, willing it to be morning so that the nightmare would end, and everything would be normal again.
The overall feel of this movie matched my childhood fears so much that I was honestly creeped out at times, feeling as if the filmmakers were inside my head, or wondering if someone had sold them a story I may have told about myself long ago. It also didn't help that, whispered by both a four-year-old boy and a distorted demon, the name "Kaylee" can sound an awful lot like "Katie". I half expected something to lunge through the screen at me, at certain points, and, for the first time in a long time, caught myself looking over my shoulder as if something might be in the room with me.
That's another thing I liked about the way this movie was shot. While the fact that we don't really see anyone's faces, or the demon himself, really, I think it's better off that way, because it really amplifies that eerie feeling of thinking you see someone or something out of the corner of your eye. In my personal opinion, the things that seemingly made so many people dislike this movie, are actually what makes it so true to life, and are definitely what unlocked all of these core memories for me as I watched it.
I can definitely understand, though, why the experimental film style may not appeal to everyone. Perhaps as a short film, it could have been better received. But ultimately, I feel as though Skinamarink is definitely a movie for a particular type of audience, designed for people who have, on some level, all had similar experiences with this type of childhood terror. If you were never that kind of kid, if you were never truly afraid of the dark in any capacity, or prone to nightmares, or had an imagination that made shadows come alive, then I feel like it may not be the movie for you, because it just might not make a whole lot of sense to someone who has never felt like Kevin and Kaylee did in the movie. It may just feel long and drawn-out and weird. (In my opinion, the movie felt long, but not a "boring" long. It felt very much like lying awake at night with my mind running wild, praying for morning to come quickly so that the darkness would go away. I really felt like I was experiencing this entire night with these kids.) Someone who hasn't been there, is likely going to just see a bunch of random shots of empty hallways, and ceilings and corners of rooms...But to me, to someone who who once laid awake at night staring up at those ceilings and strange corners, sometimes even feeling brave enough to peer down those hallways, it all makes perfect sense. This is a different type of childhood nostalgia; the exact opposite of watching your old favorite Christmas special. This is being trapped inside your most memorable nightmare.
All in all, I'm very happy I watched this movie, and it's amazing to me how many people seem to have felt similarly to how I did in my childhood, in a way that makes this resonate with them at all. It's something I think is going to stay with me a long time...last night I actually found myself nervous to move through the house in the dark, questioning every sound I heard, and getting an eerie feeling every time I looked at a doorway or window. It's been awhile since a movie has made me feel this way...but this is the closest to childhood fear I think I've ever been in my adult life, and I'll never stop being impressed by Skinamarink for its ability to capture that. I'll probably watch it again, multiple times, and continue to find new details and make new analyses as to what is actually going on. Honestly, I feel I could probably make several more posts about this movie. I could talk about it forever...or at least for the next 572 days. ;-)
Stay spooky, my friends.
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