Skinamarink, 2022 – ★★★★ (contains spoilers)

from https://letterboxd.com/ceecide/film/skinamarink/ at 6:41 am on October 25, 2024

This review may contain spoilers.

when i was a child i’d sometimes woke up while everyone else was asleep
i’d shuffle round the house while tvs flickered on the blank faces of family members
i was not part of their world, i was an outsider, it was an indescribable loneliness.
a large bulk of my childhood memories exist solely as that same feeling.
i couldn’t sleep alone in a room for many years.

last night i had that same feeling, as though i am out of sync with everyone else
i am not part of this world, i am an outsider, an indescribable loneliness.
last night the black hole in my chest was not constructed of sadness or heartbreak
but instead it took the shape of a child balled up, one who is no longer part of this world.

wrote that poem over a month ago, this movie perfectly captures that feeling i had as a child. in addition to this other-worldliness i had, i was often scared due to trauma (?) from my dad and step-mom who found it humorous to make me extremely scared, at times scaring me with ideas of being tortured by them.

there’s a part near the 1/3rd point of walking down a corridor and it was like a flashback to my childhood, this hypnagogic state in almost complete darkness, perhaps my earliest experiences with derealization.

its so weird from the perspective of a theatrical film but becomes more understandable from the lens of an analog horror youtube video, but given that genres complete oversaturation to a point where the scares are so identical that you can follow a Twitter tutorial on “how to make scary analog horror faces” it feels insulting to label this film as only that.

i felt like Kailee’s apprehension about discussing her mother had to due with divorce or perhaps abuse, but that might be projecting my own feelings.

good film, especially scary ending, i will put this in my Proper Scares list which is made up of only 4 movies so far despite the 100+ horror movies i’ve logged so far