Odds & ends #11: in this house edition

In 2003, the Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone was listed as one of the 100 most memorable toys of the 20th century.

It’s only January, but the best horror movie of the year has already been released. So has the worst horror movie of the year. They’re the same movie: Kyle Edward Ball’s debut feature Skinamarink, a viral sensation that’s already earned many times its budget back in limited theatrical release. Even though it’s not available on streaming until the beginning of February, not since Halloween Ends has a horror movie met with such divided reactions, with the usual measured “this movie murdered my dog and shit in my dead grandmother’s mouth” response from those who didn’t like it.

It’s hard to explain what Skinamarink is about, because it isn’t about anything. It’s sort of a found footage film, but not exactly. It has no real plot to speak of, and its only characters are two very small children, whose faces we never see, and who have a minimal amount of dialogue. Filmed on what looks like grainy Super-8 film and barely lit, what Skinamarink does is capture the disorienting sense of childhood fear, and the feeling that there’s something very close that means to do you harm, but you don’t know exactly what it is. Using the actual home he grew up in as the setting, Ball illustrates how even the safest places can suddenly seem dangerous, offering hiding spots for all kinds of awful things.

It is important to know before you go into Skinamarink that nothing happens in it. Things are suggested, but whether any of it is actually happening or just a product of a child’s overactive imagination is never made clear. There’s also no explanation for anything — the children’s father simply disappears in the middle of the night, as do all the exits in their house. If you accept that, and you’re able to reach back to the time when you were a child and a jacket draped over a chair looked like a hulking monster in the dark, it’s a unique experience, not scary, exactly, but unsettling. Its creepiest moments are reserved for the most innocuous things, like old Max Fleischer cartoons and that Fisher-Price toy telephone virtually everyone born between 1965 and yesterday had.

If you ignore everything I’ve just told you, you may come out of Skinamarink, like some people, angry, as if you’ve been conned in some way. You may also insist that anyone who claims that it’s scary is lying, because no one could possibly think it’s scary. If you spend enough time around horror fans, particularly on social media, you’ll learn that far too many of them either don’t know, or refuse to acknowledge, that horror, like any art form, is subjective. Simply put, what scares some people may not scare others, and that’s perfectly fine. It doesn’t require any analysis or debate: when people say a certain movie scared them, believe them. They have their reasons.

And yet, this interminable conversation happens nearly every time a new horror movie comes out, as people are quite comfortable telling other people that their feelings about something are invalid and shouldn’t be trusted. Hell, sometimes the conversation devolves into discourse over whether or not certain movies even qualify as horror. I’ve seen Hereditary, one of the most terrifying movies of all time (I could and have written entire separate essays as to why), dismissed as a “family drama,” even though there’s a scene in which a character saws off her own head with piano wire. If it was a horror movie, it’d be scary, and not everyone was scared by it, so there you go.

If that was true, from my perspective almost no slasher movie would qualify as horror, because none of them, save for the original Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street, are scary to me (the operative phrase there, you see, is “to me”). Oh sure, some of them are suspenseful, and a lot of them are gross. But scary? Nah. But what is Friday the 13th if not a horror movie, an outdoorsy adventure? Is Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects a crime caper? They’re horror movies, who cares if I found them scary or not? Is there a list of standards issued by the Department of Horror that a movie must meet before it can qualify as horror? Can I take a look at it? I have some suggestions and edits to offer.

It’s also worth noting that there’s often an overlap of horror fans who complain that current horror is nothing but sequels and reboots (which isn’t true, and hasn’t been for nearly a decade now), and those who greet anything new with immediate suspicion¹. It’s the “We want [THING]…but not like that” contradiction, marinated in the toxic juices of social media, where excitement for things exists to be tamped down and mocked.

I can’t promise that you’ll find Skinamarink scary. I didn’t, but it reminded me of times when I was scared as a child, and how I saw things crawling around in the shadows on my bedroom ceiling. It touched upon things I hadn’t thought about in a long time, like how I used to be terrified to go upstairs in my grandparents’ house, even just to use the bathroom². I’m not sure any other horror movie has been quite as effective in that regard. I can promise that it won’t be like anything you’ve ever seen before, and that alone is a remarkable accomplishment.

1. There’s a further overlap with those “fans” who complain that current horror is “too political” because female characters get to do more than bare their breasts and die.

2. An inconvenience, because that was also the only bathroom.