40: Skinamarink

Last weekend I caught up with Skinamarink, an experimental indie-horror film that set parts of the internet on fire by way of word-of-mouth. The film's been compared to the last few minutes of The Blair Witch Project, and to the churn of copypasta horror floating in various subreddits. As a formal exercise, it's interesting: a digitally-shot movie attempting to recreate the analog nightmares of children who grew up in the 1990s, surrounded by crayons and plastic toys and the layered-on analog swirl of film grain.

Skinamarink is almost, but not quite, slow cinema. Very little actually happens from a plot perspective: two children wake up in the middle of the night to find that their parents are gone, as are the exterior doors and windows of their house. Most of the shots are static images contemplating the carpet, the night light guttering in the hallway gloom, or the upper corners of the room where wall meets ceiling. We never see the faces of the children in the film, only their arms, their feet, and their backs, as they whisper their way through a darkly quiet hostile house. And yet the film's contemplative unease is broken up by the insertion of public-domain cartoons playing on a tube TV, the kind of uncanny symbol that instructs its audience to be creeped out by smiling dogs and rabbits. Old cartoons are creepy, but this observation is nothing new. Their appearance breaks up the slow cinema trance; their inclusion felt calculated, almost cold, a command simply to be afraid based on an established shorthand.

The cartoon imagery puts a face on an otherwise faceless terror. Skinamarink is at its best when it invites the viewer to contemplate the horror in the everyday, to bring their own concerns and fears to a fuzzy screen that would look boring if it were not for a trick of the light and a filter of VHS grain. Horror, as a genre, works well as a metaphor, although the best horror has metaphors that aren't explicit, or at least, that don't map neatly on to the horrifying scenario. The genre is most effective when the metaphoric read on the story is deeply personal and open to interpretation, not obvious. To be horrified is to be vulnerable, to see your hopes and fears laid out on the screen, and to be willing to acknowledge their power.

Like horror, slow cinema is an invitation for the viewer to engage. It demands undivided attention, and a willingness to stay with it through and beyond boredom. The viewer brings their entire self to the experience; what they take away is personal, because it relies on what they came with in the first place. The marriage of horror and slow cinema in Skinamarink makes for a disquieting experience, an exercise in attention and discipline that I found rewarding, at least until the film grew impatient and began to interrupt itself in its haste to tell me precisely how I should have felt.

Skinamarink is now streaming on Shudder.

What I talked about:

We released a bonus episode of Seeing and Believing podcast this week, which was mostly an excuse for Kevin and me to get excited about the movies we're looking forward to in 2023.

In our main Seeing and Believing episode, we reviewed the new TV show Poker Face. For our Watchlist segment, we visited Drew Goddard's criminally underseen 2018 movie Bad Times at the El Royale.

What I'm reading:

Ted Chiang's analysis of AI chatbots in The New Yorker this week illuminates a piece of technology that I find opaque–and makes a case for the hard, human work that is the writing process.

What I'm listening to:

Paramore is back! I've been loving the funk of their lead single "This Is Why" for a few months now. The entire album (also titled This Is Why) lives up to the promise of the song: rangy, measured, smart, petulant, and just a little off kilter.