That second assessment may be an exaggeration. The first is not.
I might have gotten to Skinamarink sooner except that Josh Larsen on Filmspotting brought it into my awareness half-apologetically. I can see why he did, but he should have sold it harder that first time. (And made up for it by naming it his #2 movie of 2023 so far, on a mid-year podcast I just listened to.)
Josh's hesitation was a result of the acknowledgement that this film would not work for everybody. It is the horror movie version of slow cinema, but it's even more inaccessible than that to a certain crowd. None of the four characters in the film are ever seen clearly, nor heard in any traditional exchange of dialogue. The images and sounds that do make up the film's 100 minutes are strange canted angles of a house in 1995, lit primarily by old cartoons on TV (in the public domain, as told to us by the film's opening credits, which are all the credits), and strange guttural sounds, possibly voices, that we can rarely make out without the assistance of subtitles. And it goes on this way for the entirety of the running time.
And my skin is crawling just remembering it.
I don't want to spoil the experience of discovery that is Skinamarink by telling you too much more about it. All I really want to say is that while Kyle Edward Ball's film is in conversation with familiar horror tropes, not a one of them is presented in a way you can predict or in a way you've seen a hundred times before. The grainy imagery triples the level of dread as you're watching shapes move (or possibly not move; are your eyes playing tricks on you?) and sounds burrow themselves into the core of your deepest fears. This is a movie you need to watch with all the lights out, with no other distractions, and with as few pauses as you can manage. If you think it sounds like a chore, you won't have to wait long to be completely in its spell and frightened like you haven't been in years.
It was still in a state of post-viewing joy, 24 hours later, than I chose the remake of The Amityville Horror as my Friday night viewing. I'd seen, and quite liked, the original for the first time as recently as Halloween 2017.
I had no illusions that this was going to take me to the same place as Skinamarink. However, the reason I landed on it was that one of my podcasters -- on a podcast that doesn't ordinarily focus on movies -- had recently listed it as a film that contained an image she couldn't get out of her mind. I couldn't remember what that image was, but these sorts of testimonials are the foundation for potentially unexpectedly good horror, and at only 90 minutes, Andrew Douglas' film seemed well worth taking the plunge.
It was not.
This is a pretty terrible haunted house movie. It throws at us your standard series of haunted house images -- your dead girl here, your wall unexpectedly full of maggots there -- and even if the original movie should be justly credited with introducing some of these tropes to us, the remake does nothing with them and is just incredibly boring. I received exactly one chill in this movie, and it was also with an obvious effect that just happened to be reasonably well done so it got me.
The most interesting thing about the movie was seeing Ryan Reynolds at the very beginnings of a career that would dominate the box office for the next decade-and-a-half, not to mention Chloe Grace Moretz in what must have been her first role, seeing as how the credits "introduced" her to us. Anything related to horror or hauntings or trying to maintain the good name of a beloved horror classic? Utterly worthless. The house, renowned for how its front windows look sort of like eyes, doesn't have a personality in the slightest.
I will say, however, that it was astonishing how ripped Reynolds was then:
Yowza.
Oh, and the image that had bothered this podcaster so much? A dead girl takes someone's finger and sticks it into the bullet hole in her head. It didn't bother me at all, even if I'd never seen it before.
It isn't easy to scare somebody, so the viewing of Amityville Horror increased my appreciation of the sort of feat Skinamarink had pulled off. I may just have to revisit it as a Halloween viewing this year, maybe share it with my wife, if she'd be patient enough to stick with it.
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