Found-footage horror films offer a trade-off, sacrificing plot and polished production values in order to emulate home videos, thusly imparting a sense that atrocities are actually happening in front of your eyes. In Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity, one of the subgenre’s most effective films, the viewer is encouraged to play the role of detective, parsing banal footage for details that are “off,” signaling demonic invasion. The contrast between banality and uncanniness is central to these films. Lose one or the other of those qualities and the production will collapse into nothingness, as Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink illustrates.
Skinamarink isn’t exactly a found-footage movie, though it’s indebted to the methods by which those films achieve their shock effects. Ball has taken the final five or so minutes of most found-footage films, which usually involves the intrusion of the supernatural, and stretched the climax out to the length of a feature film. There’s no normalcy in Skinamarink, no sense of regular life under violation. Instead, the film involves an abstract trip to a domestic hell, inviting you to scrutinize a setting you already know to be deranged. Once you acclimate yourself to the lay of the land, which doesn’t take long, Skinamarink feels repetitive, offering depressive, dehumanized surrealistic flourishes that exist in an unvarying series of loops.
The film is set in 1995, primarily because younger horror filmmakers continue to pine for the analogue objects of the pre-digital, pre-internet world, and is restricted to the interior of a house in the middle of the night. Two children—Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault)—are looking for their parents, who have either left for the evening, abandoned them, or are tormenting them. We never see the kids, or any other person, straight on, as Ball shows them as disembodied legs, at times scurrying into various rooms, or an occasional hand. The height of suspense here is wondering whether, say, a child or a demon knocked a few Legos over on the floor. We don’t even really hear Kevin and Kaylee, as their voices are so de-emphasized by the film’s soundtrack that subtitles are required to parse most of the dialogue.
What we see, without reprieve, are shadowy rooms in rigorously arranged compositions that vary in terms of symmetry. Symmetrical images connote what passes in Skinamarink for comfort, while asymmetrical shots of threatening stairs and sharp chairs suggest a chilling realm fashioned entirely out of uncomfortable angles. The cinematography is grainy with warm colors, like the movie is being seen on a VHS tape that’s been watched a hundred times, and all the while, the children’s disembodied voices guide us through the images. Ball has done away with conventional film coverage, presumably to place the audience in the position of the children, who are lost in a house that’s growing unfamiliar to them. Remember as a child wandering in the middle of the night, seeing your living room illuminated only by a television, and feeling an intrusion from another dimension? Skinamarink offers 100 minutes of that sensation.
The film is confidently made, and certain upside-down images are especially creepy. But Skinamarink’s spell is broken by its sheer, ungodly slowness, which springs from a paucity of ideas. There’s simply not much going on here. And with one’s mind permitted to roam for vast stretches, there’s time to consider Ball’s borrowings. The contrast of muffled, infantile voices on the soundtrack with images of menacing corridors suggests the climax of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, another film that established normalcy, as a control group, before plunging us into the abyss. Shots of a TV set’s glare illuminating children’s toys recall images from Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, while mysterious POV shots bring to mind practically every slasher movie ever made. And the possession theme that may or may not creep into Skinamarink, depending on your reading of it, finally brings to mind Paranormal Activity and its sequels.
Ball’s innovation is to present such enjoyable hokum with a kind of Bressonian anti-naturalism, turning the proceedings austere and humorless. For one, the children’s toys aren’t arranged with a sense of wild clutter, but with an eye for cold tactility. What this monotonous formalist exercise doesn’t have, though, is Bresson’s sense of how minute details reveal unexpected dimensions of a person’s soul. As a short film or photography exhibit, Skinamarink would’ve probably been chilling and evocative, particularly as a parable of child neglect and abuse. It will certainly be catnip for people who believe themselves to be superior to the insidious opiates of rudimentary human interest, but for those who don’t long for horror films that suggest a Halloween issue of Architectural Digest, it may prove too easy to shrug off.
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