Skinamarink (d. Kyle Edward Ball, 2023)

One of the things that a lot of old-schoolers—even the ones who generally liked the remake—complained about with Bloober Teams approach to Silent Hill 2 is that there’s a certain level of jankiness, graininess, and brokenness about the original game that’s just gone by necessity. There’s something that hits different about staring into a hallway, your light barely even penetrating the darkness, bouncing off of a vague abstraction of a lived-in apartment building or abandoned hospital, as opposed to a lovingly crafted, photoreal rendition of the same. Your mind just meets the abstraction halfway, and if it’s got any semblance of an imagination, it’ll craft terrors for you that Hollywood money can’t buy.

Skinamarink is 100 minutes of that feeling. A film taking its sweet time, stripping away every guard rail of typical horror media. The two children at its center wake up one night to find out their parents have disappeared. Then the doors. Then the windows. Then the lights. And then the shadows start moving. And then there are voices calling the kids upstairs. And mom’s upstairs. but something is breaking her bones. But you never actually see any of this in any discernible sense. Now, that does require a lot of buy-in from the viewer, because a mind that can’t really surrender its imagination like that will just see a 100-minute movie about two kids watching cartoons and yawn. But still. Turn out your lights, turn off your phone, watch this sucker in silence. You might be surprised where it takes you.