How to haunt a house (and how not to)

Between Thursday and Friday nights, I saw one of the best horror movies I've ever seen, and one of the worst.

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.

The horror ... the horror

Just a few thoughts and a not very clever post title related to our Halloween night viewing ... though when I say "our," I am stretching the definition of that. (More on that in a moment.) I'm falling asleep on the night after Halloween as I write this, but I can't let Halloween completely leave us without telling you what we watched. (Again, "we" is not entirely accurate.)

The movie scheduled was The Amityville Horror, and it was the comparatively rare instance of a movie my wife had seen and I hadn't. It was playing on Stan, and she selected that over a contender that I had seen but she hadn't, Berberian Sound Studio.

The viewing got off to an inauspicious start when our children repeatedly interrupted our first 20 minutes, that crucial period when the mood of a movie is set, by running up and down the hallway and shrieking at the tops of their lungs. This was at least slightly better than the other thing they did, which was the older one getting up to some unspecified naughtiness, which would later be explained to us by the younger one, semi-unintelligibly, through tears. It wasn't the naughtiness that was the big distraction; it was the tears. And though in these troubled times you never want to blame the victim, I couldn't help thinking that if the younger one would just shut up we could watch this damn movie. I suppose we couldn't fully blame them, as Halloween does tend to be an exciting time, and the sugar they'd consumed excited their blood even more.

Well, all the pausing makes Stan a little cantankerous, and whether the pausing itself was to blame in this particular instance, we started having streaming issues on our TV. A number of resets of the device that manages the streaming later, it still had not significantly improved, and my wife, who was far more sleepy and far more reclined on the couch than I was, finally gave up on it, especially considered that it was now 9:30 and we had at least 90 minutes left in the movie.

I could have done the same, but could not tolerate the idea of not completing a viewing of a horror movie on Halloween. So I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was the device connected to the TV, and not our internet itself, that was to blame for the performance issues by connecting up my laptop with an HDMI cable and playing it through there. At which point it played fine for the rest of the movie. (My wife was only a few minutes removed from having given up, but she could not be drawn back in at this point, already mentally checked into bed.)

The first substantive comment I want to make about this movie is how much of a debt The Shining owed to it a year later. Now, the actual novels on which the two films were based were both written in 1977, but Amityville made it to the screen sooner than the King novel, so the influence of one film on the other film is something that can reasonably be posited, though just barely. Both are films about families taking up residence in a building that had been the site of numerous previous murders at intervals throughout their histories. Both involve a dad slowly and surely going insane and threatening the safety of the rest of his family. And both dads even wield an axe to give themselves additional menace, even both using it on a door to the horror of the family member on the other side. Superficial similarities they may be in some way, but I couldn't help noticing them. (There's even a helpful outsider coming to bad ends in both films, played by Rod Stieger in Amityville and Scatman Crothers in The Shining.) The endings of the films diverge from one another in a fairly significant way, though that's all I'll say for those who may not have seen one or the other or both.

The other comment I wanted to make was how damn much James Brolin reminded me of Christian Bale in this movie. It was uncanny. The internet is of course well aware of this, so here, I've included one of literally dozens of side-by-side pictures of the two that someone else has gone to the trouble of constructing, even though this is not how Brolin looks in this movie:

Was that a "substantive" comment? I doubt it.

Okay, then I'll give you a few quick more.

How much of a knockout is Margot Kidder in this movie? I guess I always thought of her as attractive when she played Lois Lane, but I had never previously felt personally attracted to her before this film. There are some rather sultry still images of her available from this movie, but let's just keep it on the low end of the sleaziness scale by posting a picture where she's just plain darn cute:

Lastly, I should probably tell you how much or little this movie scared me. Well, I'm glad to say: much. I got the chills repeatedly watching this movie, from the opening shots of the famous house with its eye-like windows (and the gun shots ringing out during that stormy night), to the accumulation of flies nauseating the true believers, to the isolated strange noises and voices, to that flash of sinister red eyes by the window in that one scene (reminded me a bit of Suspiria).

This is one of the true granddaddies of horror, and it did not disappoint me, even though I too was succumbing to sleep near the end because of the aforementioned streaming delays and a couple of late nights in a row carving jack-o-lanterns and sewing Halloween costumes.

I'm glad to have finally seen it, and to have ended the month traditionally devoted to horror viewing on a good note.