“Look under the bed”

The horror genre is consistently reinventing itself and fans are always on the hunt for the next great scare, the next movie that’s going to keep them up at night. Skinamarink, a micro-budget feature from Canadian writer/director Kyle Edward Ball promised to be at the forefront of such a reinvention, one that embraced the possibilities for creeping dread from the point of view of two young children alone in a house in the middle of the night.

It sounds like a slam dunk proposition, the kind of movie that’s made for late night viewing on a television, which is part of the problem with seeing the movie on a big screen in an almost empty theater… the film’s many flaws are laid bare. There is an art to the meandering horror film with the terrifying payoff, it has worked dozens of times in films as varied as Rosemary’s Baby, The Blair Witch Project, and The House of the Devil. But writer/director Ball seems to have gone into this film with no real concrete plan apart from hoping an ending would come to him at some point, perhaps in the editing room.

The plot of Skinamarink, if discerning one from the scattered clues given the viewer is even possible, revolves around siblings Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), both under the age of seven, who find themselves alone in a house that is periodically changing shape. Windows appear and disappear; the toilet is suddenly gone, replaced by a bucket; even Dad (Ross Paul) has disappeared after delivering some exposition about Kevin having hit his head. By about the 45 minute mark, the only person in the house with them is a disembodied demonic voice imploring them to do increasingly horrible things.

The kids mostly just hang out in the living room watching old public domain cartoons with plots tangentially related to their own dilemma, all meant to add to the eerie dread happening throughout the film. LEGO bricks are half heartedly chucked into frame while both children sleep, indicating an otherworldly presence that’s never fully revealed, giving the whole endeavor an even cheaper feel in retrospect.

At first, the exploitation of the inherent scariness of being a little kid in an old house awake at night when everyone else is asleep is quite effective. The weird shapes that shadows cast on the wall thanks to the light of another room. Muffled conversations being had by the adults in the other room. Creaking floorboards. Heaters turning on. This is the stuff of nightmares and it works… for about a half hour.

But then the film just drags on and on (and on and on), relying solely on cheap jump scares for actual thrills, making it apparent there’s no great plan here. It’s not unlike some nonsense on the internet where you turn the volume on your headphones all the way up to hear what’s happening and some creepy pasta character jumps out and screams at full volume. This 100 minute film has roughly 15 minutes worth of actual stuff happening in it, and it just plays like a dead fish.

Maybe at a film festival, in a packed house, where you’ve been seeing movies all day long and your body is just used to sitting through movies, this thing would play like gangbusters. At 2am on a television in your rumpus room while everyone else in the house is asleep, maybe this thing would scare the pants off of you. But on a Friday night (Friday the 13th no less), in an enormous theater in a multiplex in Chicago with only one other couple—and a family of five who took entirely too long to realize they were in the wrong theater—it plays not unlike an endurance test. One where the temptation to look at the screen is constantly at war with your temptation to look at your phone.

I’m not sure what the “proper circumstances” are for seeing this movie and having it affect you, but I certainly did not have that experience. There’s some talent at work in the creation of this film. Directing it toward a project that demands feature length would be a worthy use of that talent.