4/15/2023 0 Comments Meaning utterly![]() Skinamarink demands you surrender yourself to its particular style of somnambulistic viewing, preferably in a pitch black room … by yourself, while anyone else in the house is asleep. It just doesn’t work that way, any more than a guided meditation would work with constant interruptions. One can’t watch the film in a room flooded by light, or between furtive glances at a smartphone. One can’t have a conversation with a friend during Skinamarink and hope for it to have the intended effect. That’s the thing with Skinamarink-it’s going to be experienced in vastly different ways by each viewer, dependent upon factors such as innate suggestibility, attention span and the context of its screening. In the same sense that a sensory deprivation chamber often provokes spontaneous images and sounds in a human brain struggling to make connections without stimuli, so Skinamarink sweeps you away to your own private nightmare. Skinamarink, however, is more like the opposite-the film’s ultra grainy visual aesthetic and muddy audio (with cleverly hardcoded subtitles) slowly but surely hypnotizes the viewer into a state of heightened suggestibility, until the viewer’s mind begins to provide its own hallucinatory meaning to what it is seeing. Now, when one says “sensory-driven” in this context, one might expect that to imply a certain lushness that overwhelms the senses, a la James Cameron’s approach in Avatar: The Way of Water. If someone hosted a filmmaking competition where the stated goal was to engineer a work as divisive as it possibly could be, surely Skinamarink would be a shoo-in to win the grand prize.Ĭreated on a budget of $15,000 (Canadian!) as the feature debut of filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball, and dedicated to assistant director Joshua Bookhalter, who passed away during post-production, Skinamarink is an exercise in experimental, sensory-driven horror filmmaking. This is a daring, unsettling, inscrutable and at times deeply boring venture into the farthest boundaries of horror esotericism, utterly unlike anything that most viewers will have ever seen before. When it comes to Skinamarink, on the other hand, convention flies out the window. The temptation would be to correlate the release of this zero-budget piece of experimental horror with the likes of Paranormal Activity in 2009, but Paranormal Activity, for all its lo-fi found footage trappings, was still a conventional (but cleverly constructed) narrative. Check that: There has never, in mankind’s history of recorded images on film, been something quite like Skinamarink in theaters. ![]() ![]() ![]() It’s been a while since there’s been something like Skinamarink in theaters. ![]()
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