Mary: Skinamarink was poised to be the hot new horror movie of the moment, if you take TikTok’s word for it. I kept seeing videos touting how scary the film was, or how it was the best in a new wave of analog horror stories. After the youngest member of my D&D party talked about how much he enjoyed it, and after it got a limited release for one weekend in my town, I bought a ticket and went.

It was… not what I expected. 

Skinamarink is a 2023 horror film directed and written by Kyle Edward Ball. It follows two young kids who wake up to find that their parents have disappeared, leaving them trapped in their familiar-yet-unfamiliar house, where strange things soon begin to happen. The windows and doors are gone, and the kids are, well, kids. They have no clue what to do and try to navigate the situation as best they can.

Skinamarink is available to stream on Shudder as of Feb. 2, so make sure to check it out before reading our slightly spoiler-ish discussion! 

What made you want to see the movie, Emily? Also, we are thrilled to have Samantha Allen (author of Patricia Wants to Cuddle and guest on our Bullet Train episode) here to talk with us about this horror movie! What made you check it out, Samantha?

Emily: Honestly, I wasn’t sure I was going to see it. Which is odd for me, because normally I see every horror movie that comes out, whether it’s good or not. But I kind of think one of the worst things a horror movie can do is be boring. So when I heard this was super boring… I really did think I might skip it. But you know, horror always reels me in somehow. And Samantha invited me to go see it with her. Basically, long story short, I won’t say no to horror ever. I can’t help myself. 

So with all of that in mind, I went in not expecting much from this movie. It sounds like Mary had the opposite experience and went in with high expectations. Samantha, what were your expectations going into this movie?

Samantha: Emily, I think we were watching some other horror movie together—was it Prey for the Devil? 😂—when I first saw the trailer for this and I thought, “There’s something that I’ll catch on streaming!” Not long afterward, I guess TikTok decided it was the scariest movie they had ever pirated. I’m usually pretty skeptical about claims like that. There was a time when people were saying that the 2017 Spanish horror movie Veronica was absolutely bone-chilling, and a bunch of articles got written about it, but it was… well, it was fine. 

So I ignored the Skinamarink hype until friends whose taste I respected started genuinely recommending it. I knew it would be potentially boring, and wouldn’t have conventional plotting, so I went into it expecting to either be like, “I hated that” or “I’m glad I saw it.” With movies this experimental, so much of it rests on execution rather than concept. Mary, how did it square up with what you thought it would be?

Mary: Oh gosh, well, I definitely felt roped in by the TikTok critique, too. It seemed like it was trying to capitalize on a lot of trendy horror tropes that are cool right now—like analog horror/backrooms types of things—and I thought it could be cool. It wasn’t what I was expecting, and yet at the same time, it was. I want to say that I didn’t enjoy Skinamarink, and I distinctly remember texting Emily about it and warning her against it, but … I did talk about it for days afterward, and that has to count for something, doesn’t it? 

Emily: It does. And we don’t always agree on all movies. For instance, you didn’t like TÁR. So. I had to go see for myself. 

Samantha: I, too, found myself thinking about Skinamarink long after viewing. And considering that most media I consume goes straight through my brain like it’s a sieve, I’ll call it worth seeing for that reason alone. This will sound pretentious as hell, Mary, but I don’t know that I consider its quality on a scale of “enjoyment.” In the immortal words of Hannah Ann Sluss on The Bachelor, “We knew what we signed up for”: a mood piece where barely anything happens. I knew it might be a bit of a slog, but I wanted to know if it was a slog with some value in it.

Mary: That’s a really great point, Samantha. It definitely advertises itself as a movie built on ~vibes~ and it did deliver on that.

Maybe we should talk about what works, first. For me, I enjoyed the low budget-ness of it, and how the audience never really sees the entity lurking about the house. Instead, more mundane things are twisted to be scary—Barbie dolls plastered to the walls, parents who aren’t acting just right, or—my favorite—a disappearing toilet. The setting felt familiar and unfamiliar, striking that uncanny balance, and that was doing something for me. Like we talk about a little in our upcoming podcast ep, I used to imagine things were moving around at night, up to something malicious, so the atmosphere was on point for me. 

Emily: Meanwhile, I am not scared of things moving around at night. I’m afraid of people. So the parts of the movie that were more grounded in human emotions and human interactions did more for me. These were few and far between throughout the movie, but for me the strongest part of the movie was the scene where Kaylee goes into her parents’ bedroom and talks with her mother and father. There’s clearly something really off about this conversation, and it’s unsettling that the parents are facing away from Kaylee the whole time they’re talking to her. 

In terms of what was really going on with the parents and what that family dynamic was before the events of the movie, I’m not quite sure. It wasn’t totally clear to me what was going on with the parents (especially the mother). But I found this interesting and genuinely creepy, and it would have been nice to have more moments like this. 

Samantha: It sounds like I’m the most Skinamarink-pilled of the three of us, but I’m definitely not at the “this is a horror masterpiece” level. I thought it was a really interesting, and frankly kind of innovative, approach to horror storytelling: we’re mostly forced to look in the corners and the shadows as presumably nightmarish things unfold in this house. I found myself staring at static and film grain, looking for shapes like I was trying to find patterns in the stucco ceiling of my own childhood home. I thought it was extremely evocative as a potential metaphor for abuse, or simply for the alienation of being a child. Did it “scare” me? Not really. But it was way more interesting than a film that insistently looks away from its action has any right to be. Not perfect, but compelling—for me at least.

Mary: I also read some reviews (okay, also wild Reddit threads) talking about Skinamarink as a movie about abuse, and I can see that working as a reading. I do think that even though I’ve spent a lot of time badmouthing Skinamarink, it’s a strength for a film to hold up to multiple interpretations, like good experimental lit.

The things I didn’t like far outweighed what I enjoyed. Okay, so I’m supposed to believe this entity haunting the house (if it even is the same house) can do “anything it wants,” but what it chooses to do is like, stick toys to the wall? It’s kind of creepy, but not really a demonstration of power. When the entity does show its power, it’s in a very noisy jumpscare that hurt my ears more than it scared me. 

Also, atmosphere does a lot for a horror movie, but if I have to look at one more corner of a ceiling I will scream. The director, Kyle Edward Ball, apparently had a set of rules he used to craft Skinamarink, which included not using music or showing characters’ faces. These rules sound cool in theory, but on the screen it amounted to a lot of shots of the ceiling, or darkness, or the ever-present television. 

Emily: I think that’s the big issue for me with this movie. I get what you’re saying, Samantha. It’s intriguing to be forced to look away from the action. The mind is able to conjure up images much more terrifying than anything our eyes can see, after all. Watching this movie, I totally got that Ball was working with a set of rules/parameters he made for himself. That was clear.

My question though is why? How is this serving the narrative of the film? As I was watching these different shots of random corners of the room, I felt really distracted. I kept wondering whose perspective we were in and how these camera shots served the story we were being told. In some moments, it was clear the camera was moving along with Kaylee’s point of view, but these shots of the corners of the room and on the ceiling remain still. They had the feel of security footage cameras. But then why would those cameras be directed at ceilings and dark corners where you can’t see anything?

Mary: And speaking of that darkness, I read some reviews that praised the film for encouraging viewers to pick out strange things in the darkness, because the nothingness seemed to move with the grain of the low quality film. That absolutely was not a film effect, though. It seemed to be a computer generated filter that repeated—REPEATED—on a loop. So you’d end up seeing the same swirling patterns over and over. The only thing scary about that is how it’s kind of careless IMO. That sounds harsh, but here we are. 

Samantha: OK, if the loop thing is true, I feel silly for trying to find patterns in it. I should have brought a Magic Eye book with me or something.

Emily: I was never able to see those Magic Eye things. Maybe that’s why I didn’t look for patterns in the swirlies. Or maybe it’s because this movie made me very sleepy. 

I think we need to talk about the sound in this film as well. Mary, I know you mentioned that there was no music in this movie and that there were a few loud, startling moments. But aside from that, the sound in this movie is noteworthy mostly because the quality is so bad. This is seemingly on purpose. But again, I have to ask why?

Samantha: I almost didn’t want to see the movie because the sibilance on the “s” in “in this house” was so annoying in the trailer. I know it was probably a deliberate choice to have the children whisper and put their dialogue in subtitles, but I would have preferred the mix to just be clear enough that I could hear what they were saying. Again, this feels like one of those parameters Emily mentioned: there’s probably some rule about how much ambient sound the movie has to be awash in at all times. It’s almost aggressive at times, almost like it doesn’t want to be viewed? There’s an interesting line there—one that a lot of horror films have to watch—between intentionally making the viewer feel unpleasant and inviting them in. This movie is definitely not for everyone!

Mary: Definitely! I appreciate the low-quality-filmed-on-a-potato feeling so much, but it crossed the line for me where it was too hard to understand—just to comprehend what was going on. I will say, Skinamarink delighted me by having subtitles hard baked right in. I always watch TV and movies with subtitles, just because it helps me follow along when I miss something or if the sound editing is wonky (I also just have a hard time comprehending dialogue sometimes, and reading helps). More subtitles for everyone! Maybe one day I will work up the bravery to ask my movie theater if they have a closed captioning device.

To shift gears a little, who is this movie for? 

Emily: To me, this movie had the feel of one of those artsy movies that plays in an art museum on a loop all day. No one really sits down and watches the whole thing. You take a seat on the bench in front of the projection screen and you reflect on the images for a few beats. Then you move on to the next exhibit. I truly feel like that’s how this movie was supposed to be experienced. 

Samantha: It’s for sickos like me who’ve gotten so numb to horror movies that the only way we can have fun anymore is sitting through something borderline painful. Truly, though, it is for talking about. Neither of you particularly liked it—and yet we can’t resist the discourse!

Mary: I know! While in the movie, I kept looking over to my movie companions and was struck by the viscerally different reactions they were having. My husband Todd was looking at the screen through his hands, sunk down in his chair, while our friend Kyle was shaking his head and looking over at me as if to say, “Why did you bring me here?” or “What is this?” Everyone I’ve talked to has had a different reaction to it, which does count for something. It’s been fun to talk about and ponder, but I can’t say I enjoyed Skinamarink, you know?

I think maybe my biggest critique is that this might have worked better as a short film—or a shorter film. And really, it was! Skinamarink came out of a short film project by Ball. I felt interested in the atmosphere, and something interesting was definitely happening (as we said, we’re still talking about it), but I could’ve done with fewer shots of the ceiling to cut down on some of that time. Anticipation is good, and tension is good, but the same effect could’ve been achieved with a little less, maybe.

Emily: I can’t wait for the inevitable parody of this movie, because some of this stuff was just so ridiculously pretentious. And some of it was just ridiculous. Period.