Endless Night: My ‘Skinamarink’
Mae Murray
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After my stepmother died, there was a ghost in our house. The ghost was my father. When you’re 11 and the oldest, you feel big because you’re bigger than the smallest child, and in a home of three you’re the second in command. But at night, when the adult is gone and hasn’t come home and it’s 2003 and there is no way to call your parent and no way to know where they have gone, you begin to shrink, and the darker and quieter it gets as the night grows thick, the smaller you become. The house you occupy becomes deafeningly silent and the walls begin to speak to you—and the words are not kind.
Skinamarink, a film by Canadian-born writer/director Kyle Edward Ball, took me back to a place in my childhood I so often try to forget. It’s a house-shaped hole inside me in which it is endless night, and I am alone with my little brother. The film follows four-year-old Kevin and six-year-old Kaylee after they wake to find themselves alone in their house, all the doors and windows gone and no way to call for help. What happens next is a slow descent into a liminal nightmare.
One of the first things I can remember is thirst. I remember waking in the middle of the night on a blanket on the floor, the tv screen flickering, and looking for my mother. I found her passed out on a mattress face-down. I shook her and called for her, but she would not wake. The thirst clawed at my throat. I picked up the cup sitting on the floor beside the mattress and drank, but realized quickly that what I was drinking tasted sour. That was the first time I drank beer. I was three years old, and after, I was still so very thirsty, and still my mother would not wake.
Another night, a few years later, my little brother and I were left in my 10-year-old half-sister’s charge. Do not come back to the bedroom, my mother said. Do not open the door. But my sister was acting strange, giggling and slopping cold noodles into her mouth with her hands. They dripped on the floor and clung to her chin, and then she was asleep and I could not wake her up and I was afraid of The Blair Witch. Should I wake mommy up? I wondered. Should I go back to the bedroom and open the door?
Behind the door, my mother was smoking meth, but when I opened it, I did not understand it at the time. She ran to my sister and tried to wake her, but she wouldn’t respond. She ran an ice bath and put her inside to revive her, but my sister barely stirred. I realized some time later, my 10-year-old half-sister had been intoxicated, drinking vodka while we all watched cartoons. Not long after that, we didn’t go to mom’s house on the weekends anymore. It wasn’t because we weren’t allowed to. She just stopped picking us up.
There is no debate that the success of Skinamarink, which was filmed in Ball’s childhood home on a meager $15,000 budget, means a great deal for other indie horror filmmakers trying to prove that producing and distributing indie is a profitable risk, but there is some divide from viewers on the merits of the film’s hour and forty-minute runtime. The lens of Skinamarink lingers in dark corners uncomfortably long, until the nebulous shadows appear to shape-shift into humanoid figures, demonic faces, or blacker voids (a real-life phenomenon called pareidolia). The viewer is subjected to static frames of LEGO towers and the off-camera murmurings of the film’s two child protagonists, then quick cuts of the LEGOs scattering and the thump-thump-thump of footsteps running in the empty house. The most terrifying character in the film is a toy phone that only gets about a minute of screen time.
Christmas Eve, 2003, I was terrified. Daddy hadn’t come home. My little brother was sleeping, but I could not sleep. My stepmother had been dead for two months, and Samara from The Ring was living inside my television. I sat on the floor next to my brother’s bed in the dark, watching the hazy image of his pale but peaceful face. I looked at the door and how large it loomed, the darkness of the rest of the house beyond it and so many ghosts. Where was Daddy? When I could no longer take the shadows of my imagination, the way the darkness stretched on, the endless night of a child’s fear, I called my grandmother. My father had been in a jail cell that night for drunk driving, and had not called anyone for us. A child alone is better than a parent’s shame.
For the average viewer, the film may be a confusing and dizzying descent into what-the-fuck? For the viewer who was left alone at night as a child, it is a biography. Like the world of Skinamarink, Ball’s direction is simultaneously lawless and coldly calculated. He knows what children are afraid of, and he knows the child you were is still inside you.
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