Episode 105 - Skinamarink (2022)

100 Horrors

Director Kyle Edward Ball cut his teeth on YouTube, making making terrifying visual accompaniments to the nightmares that people submitted to him across Reddit. After that, he pulled together the money to make Skinamarink, which for a mere $15,000 took the Tik Tok world by storm and gained huge noteriety before many had even had the chance to watch it. The film then made its way to Shudder, and then recommendations subsequently landed in our inbox from a lot of our listeners who insisted that we just "had" to see this movie. I got excited. Rob got excited. Paul got drunk, and then he got excited, as is usually the way with him. And then we watched the film. There is potential that Skinamarink is going meta, in that the act of watching a film based on nightmares feels like a nightmare. Maybe the true horror here is not the content, but the act of watching a film in which the viewer can only see the top of door frames, close ups of TVs and the occasional foot, but I have to admit, this eventuality seems very unlikely. There are fewer than 500 words spoken in this film, but does that mean that the film doesn't have much to say? It's very hard to know to be honest, but it is easy to dismiss this film as being vacuous - a little lacking in content - and I think people would be forgiven for thinking this. This movie is not for everyone, but the people that it is for clearly LOVE Skinamarink. At the end of the day, Ball tries to do something new with the horror genre, and that absolutely has to be commended. Should you watch Skinamarink? I guess you could, or you could tune in to hear us talk about why we're not likely to watch it again.