Skinamarink

Skinamarink (2023)

In this house...

Two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished.

Date of release
2023-01-13
TMDB
5.3 / 10 (416)
Runtime
1h 40m
Genres
Horror
Director
Kyle Edward Ball

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $2.1M
  • Budget: CA$15K
  • Filmed in: Edmonton

Skinamarink is a 2022 Canadian experimental horror film written and directed by Kyle Edward Ball in his feature directorial debut. The film follows a young brother and sister who wake up during the night to discover that they cannot find their father and that the windows, doors, and other objects in their house are disappearing.

Production

Ball previously ran a YouTube channel called Bitesized Nightmares, through which he would ask viewers to post comments about their nightmares and then film recreations of these nightmares. Skinamarink was inspired by the tropes recurrent in the most commonly submitted nightmares. The film was preceded by the proof of concept short film Heck (2020), which was also directed by Ball. He recalled, "I'd had a nightmare when I was little.

The inspiration for the film's title came after Ball heard the film's namesake song in the 1958 film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and was reminded of Sharon, Lois & Bram's version, which he described as "an intrinsic part of [his] childhood".

Skinamarink was shot over one week in August 2021 on a budget of $15,000, which was mostly crowdfunded. It was shot on digital video, with Jamie McRae serving as cinematographer, in Ball's childhood home in Edmonton. McRae shot on a Sony FX6 with Arri Ultra Prime lenses, and lit the film with whatever they had available on location, primarily a CRT television and small LED light.

Skinamarink makes use of subtitles for certain lines of dialogue. Ball said, "The subtitles do originally appear in the script because I wanted to experiment with them. I've seen it quite a bit in analog horror on the internet. I thought it would be neat to play with scenes where we could hear people talking but it was so quiet we could only understand them with subtitles.

Ball cited the work of filmmakers Chantal Akerman, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Stanley Kubrick, and David Lynch as influences on Skinamarink. He also named the avant-garde film Wavelength (1967) and the slasher film Black Christmas (1974) as inspirations, saying, "Black Christmas has a lot of shots where there's just panning.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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