Offscreen space can be an effective tool in movies of all kinds, but horror, more than any other genre, benefits from the suggestion that something terrible may be lurking just beyond the frame’s border. What we can’t see, and thus have to conjure in our imagination, often proves scarier than any razor-toothed monster or hatchet-wielding maniac. You no doubt have your own favorite examples of this tactic—mine, at least in recent years, is a scene from Paranormal Activity 3 in which the camera-within-the-film has been mounted on a small fan that oscillates back and forth, so that we’re constantly being pulled away from a view of something that we at once do and don’t want to see. The most remarkable horror phenomenon of my cognizant lifetime (I was alive when The Exorcist came out, but much too young to be aware of it) made a point of never showing anything overtly threatening at all, apart from some vaguely freaky-looking stick figures; “What the fuck is that?!?” a character screams at one point while running panicked through the woods in the middle of the night, but we never see the locally legendary Blair Witch ourselves. This withholding approach arguably pissed off as many people as it thrilled, but nobody came away unaffected.


Having lived through the Blair Witch wars that summer of 1999, I find it exceedingly difficult to imagine how general audiences are going to process Skinamarink, an ultra-low-budget, literally homemade horror movie that’s somehow found its way into several hundred theaters nationwide. This seems highly, almost comically improbable not because the film doesn’t merit being seen, but because it possesses few, if any, of the attributes that people who don’t watch a lot of non-narrative avant-garde shorts would consider integral to the art and craft of motion pictures. No exaggeration, no hyperbole, no bullshit: Skinamarink bears zero resemblance to any commercially released film that most people who will see it have ever encountered before. Hell, I’d never seen anything like it, and I’ve watched nearly 10,000 movies to date, including a whole lot of truly strange ones. That’s an enormously exciting thing to be able to say, and writer-director Kyle Edward Ball deserves credit and respect just for having the gumption to make something so radical and get it in front of people (albeit with the unwanted help of an online leak that saw clips from the film captivate kids on TikTok). Wish I found it even a little bit scary, but you can’t have everything, I suppose.


Here's where I’d ordinarily spend a paragraph describing the movie in question’s plot and characters. Hard to do that, in this case, because Skinamarink has neither plot nor characters to speak of. Indeed, well over an hour passes before we clearly see anyone at all, and that moment is fleeting. What the movie does have is this: a house. It’s a two-story house, we eventually learn, but good luck sitting down afterwards and working out a possible floor plan, even though we never once leave (apart from a brief view of the house’s exterior). In this house live a four-year-old boy named Kevin (Lucas Paul) and a six-year-old girl named Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), represented onscreen almost exclusively via occasional glimpses of their legs and feet moving about, plus their voices. There’s also a dad (Ross Paul), but it’s unclear, very early on, where he is and what’s happened to him. And while we see the kids’ mother (Jaime Hill), there are indications that we should not be seeing her, corporeally speaking. Skinamarink’s narrative, meanwhile, consists for an insanely long time of the kids being alone in the dark house, very late at night. They watch cartoons on TV.  They play with Legos. They see objects vanish. They obey commands from a disturbing voice.


Despite my best efforts, I’m making the film sound far more conventional and straightforward than it actually is. The vast majority of its shots occupy a netherworld right on the edge of visual legibility, either because there’s not enough light to see clearly (the TV screen provides most of the illumination, though the kids sometimes carry flashlights) or because the camera occupies a position that just plain isn’t where anyone would normally put a movie camera. Sometimes both. Ball declines to establish the house’s layout in any way, and chooses angles—often low to the ground, suggesting a child’s-eye view—that are expressly designed to confound. At one point, the only thing that’s visible at first is a nightlight, far in the distance; we’ve previously seen this nightlight plugged into a socket near the floor of a hallway, but it’s now way up at the top of the frame, which doesn’t seem to make sense. Then a proper light gets turned on, revealing where we are relative to the nightlight, and it’s almost like a magic trick. (I felt the impulse to applaud.) In any case, this is primarily what I meant about Skinamarink’s formal radicalism. I’ve never before seen a commercially-released feature that constituted 100 minutes of “What am I looking at?”


How frightening that uncertainty will be depends upon what gets under your skin. Before making this feature, Ball ran a YouTube channel on which he created short videos based on people’s descriptions of things that scared them as a child, and Skinamarink—the title’s derived from “Skidamarink,” an inane kiddie nonsense song that I listened to 30 seconds of and now cannot fucking eject from my brain—clearly seeks to evoke the feeling of being scared at Kevin and Kaylee’s age, when darkness and the absence of parents are sufficient to conjure up a nightmare world. Eventually, a few overt horror touches emerge, including one that truly taps into childhood trauma: “Look under the bed,” whispers a disembodied voice (Dad?) to one of the kids, and the camera, representing the kid’s point of view, does so. I won’t say what it sees there, if anything, but that’s when I became conscious of not feeling much active fear (mostly because that whisper made me tense up so much it actually hurt my shoulders). The downside of keeping Kevin and Kaylee almost completely obscured throughout is that they can’t serve as proxies for our terror, the way that (say) Heather does with her iconic snot-nosed close-up near the end of Blair Witch. The kids don’t even really sound frightened most of the time, spooky ambience and strange voices notwithstanding. Bad things do happen to them (I think), and there’s an odd graphic that implies they’ve been trapped in this forbidding limbo for a year and a half. But this is not, fundamentally, a horror narrative about people in danger. It’s an abstract exercise in horror imagery.


Still, it’s a damn impressive abstract exercise in horror imagery. A graphic at the outset tells us this takes place in 1995, which serves primarily as an excuse for Ball, who shot Skinamarink digitally, to indulge in some old-school affectations (though the opening credit sequence is more ’70s than ’90s). I’m not keen on the Super 16mm overlays he uses to provide an analog touch, but very much appreciated the way that every room in the house has its own unique room tone—something that would seem sloppy in a production that’s striving to be professional, but proves eerily disconcerting in this context. And while I have a philosophical objection to the film’s use of subtitles at times when offscreen dialogue is difficult to make out (it’s hard to articulate, but an awareness that somebody, viz. the filmmaker, wants to be sure we understand what’s being said kills the tension), our inability to clearly see or hear almost anything in the entire movie creates a singular environment of literal dis-ease. Certainly, you can take a brief snippet and freak someone out with it, as the TikTok hoopla has already demonstrated. I found Skinamarink a tad repetitive at feature length, though, and I live for this sort of aggressively alienating, barely-a-movie shit. Will multiplex audiences accustomed to Pennywise and Ghostface tolerate it? Does what works in a short YouTube video transfer to the big screen? I’m frightfully curious. Or frightlessly, rather.


One of the first notable online film critics, having launched his site The Man Who Viewed Too Much in 1995, Mike D’Angelo has also written professionally for Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Esquire, Las Vegas Weekly, and The A.V. Club, among other publications. He’s been a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and currently blathers opinions almost daily on Patreon.