Skinamarink has attracted the worst kind of “critical” response that a half-decent film could hope for. The question of “what does it really mean?” forefronts every article on the film. But to speak seriously about any film, everything that "literally" happens and everything that's "metaphorical" are identical. In this way it’s like a dream. What happens on the screen is what happens on the screen. The open-ness a particular film allows for is itself part of that film, but open speculation beyond what the film contains within itself will not do, one must deal with work on its own terms.

Despite claims to the contrary, Skinamarink is very straightforward, yet this has become difficult to recognize in a sea of "social horror" — the dominant school of thought in filmmaking and film studies that the horror film is always about something other than itself. To make sense of the film, comparisons have been drawn to The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, either due to a perceived similarity to found-footage films — something this film is not — or to describe the film’s release. Anyone who has actually bothered to see the film will be able to make little sense of these comparisons when going beyond the level of mere aesthetic veneer. It’s clear these comparisons exist for the sake of avoiding substantial discussion of the film itself.

Yet in the face of all of this, Skinamarink is very scary. Friends who have seen it have said it has made them want to cry, pass out, throw up — a man sitting across the aisle from me in the theater shit his pants. Skinamarink is scary because it is immediately what it is. Mommy and daddy are gone, and their two children — Kaylee and Kevin — must fend for themselves in a house that has trapped them within it: doors, windows, and even the toilet disappearing (the fantasy of flushing oneself down the drain).

The majority of shots are of ceilings, corridors, lights, doorways, carpets and other fixtures inside the film’s suburban home. Much of the film is underexposed, the eye is drawn to the illuminated edges of objects in the dark. What immediately draws journalistic peons to compare the film to things like Paranormal Activity is the exquisitely kitschy film filter thrown on the film’s digital footage. 

However, using digital filters rather than getting the footage pressed onto film and then rescanning it back to digital has an effect I have seldom seen with film itself, a kind of swirl of “grain” in the shadows. On film itself grain has a uniform quality. This swirl, however, together with the stock dust and scratches found in the most wretched of film filter plug-in packs money can buy, actually begins to make the viewer question what is seen as they stare into the shadows.

The swirl of grain less recalls film than that blurred and impressionistic vision as we have when we wander our darkened homes at night. The way the eye is drawn to what is visible is like a stairwell’s assuring rail a child might clutch when going downstairs to use the bathroom upon waking up from a nightmare. Through the fashionable guise of the trashiest sensibilities prevalent in independent filmmaking, the audience is thrust into the subjectivity of childhood.

Children are an exceedingly suitable subject for film. Philistines will say it's because they elicit a sympathetic response from the audience, but that's descriptive of a psychology that we are not permitted full access to anymore. Really, it's easier to identify with a child in a film than it is with mommy and daddy. Our experience of cinema already resembles that of a child's subjectivity: the world dictatorially appearing before us in a series of shocks and explosions.

The first installment of À la recherche du temps perdu — Swann's Way — was published 110 years ago. The famous opening passage recounts the anxiety-ridden trials the narrator would experience every evening during childhood in attempting to go to sleep.

“My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted for so short a time: she went down again so soon that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the keenest sorrow. So much did I love that good night that I reached the stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have appeared… those evenings on which Mamma stayed so short a time in my room were sweet indeed compared to those on which we had guests to dinner, and therefore she did not come at all.

“…on the evenings when there were visitors… Mamma did not come up to my room. I did not, at that time, have dinner with the family: I came out to the garden after dinner, and at nine I said good night and went to bed. But on these evenings I used to dine earlier than the others, and to come in afterwards and sit at table until eight o'clock, when it was understood that I must go upstairs; that frail and precious kiss which Mamma used always to leave upon my lips when I was in bed and just going to sleep I had to take with me from the dining-room to my own, and to keep inviolate all the time that it took me to undress, without letting its sweet charm be broken, without letting its volatile essence diffuse itself and evaporate; and just on those very evenings when I must needs take most pains to receive it with due formality, I had to snatch it, to seize it instantly and in public, without even having the time or being properly free to apply to what I was doing the punctiliousness which madmen use who compel themselves to exclude all other thoughts from their minds while they are shutting a door, so that when the sickness of uncertainty sweeps over them again they can triumphantly face and overcome it with the recollection of the precise moment in which the door was shut.”

This passage finds an unusual resonance in Skinamarink, which to a great degree, sources its fearful quality from the same anxiety that the protagonist of Swann’s Way attempts to ward off with the magical quality of his mother’s goodnight kiss. But perhaps during France’s Third Republic, the terror children associated with going to sleep was different. Swann's Way still seems to speak to us in some ways, but one can quickly recognize that our psychology is not identical with Proust's characters: we are, without a doubt, worse.

The events of Swann’s Way — unlike those of Skinamarink — are mediated through the narrator’s own historical memory; things happen in the book by virtue of the narrator’s involuntary memory and discrete acts of remembrance. Though Skinamarink takes place around the turn of the century, the historical mediation occurring is opaque — it becomes not about the memory of childhood, but regression to a child: a comment I’ve heard from many who have seen the film is that “it makes you feel like a child.” The work becomes less about the aesthetic experience of reoccupying prior states of development through memory, but reveling in the experience of having never fulfilled and overcome those states to begin with. 

Unlike Proust, we are incapable of an accumulation of historical memory which could be made use of in our practical action. Subjectively, our experience of the world has become completely incongruent with an apparently “external” reality that seems to continually run us over. Amid the last 100 year’s failure to overcome the contradiction between our social being and social consciousness, our psychology has regressed while the world has only grown more unfathomable. “Positively,” this has manifested in massification: the liquidation of classes and mass atomization. For children, all of this has had terribly disastrous results. A disintegrated world will necessarily be dealt with in a disintegrated fashion.

Like Kaylee and Kevin, our sense of history — experience which could be recalled to allow us to make sense of the world — is profoundly foreshortened as that experience seems continually outstripped by a reality which develops without end. The film makes a microcosm of our experience with its phantasmagorical haunted house which transforms right when its rules seem to have been grasped. We are limited to merely groping around in the dark and reacting to external stimuli: despite no formal difference between their use in any other bargain bin horror film, Skinamarink’s jumpscares rarely feel cheap. 

The blown apart fragments of Skinamarink’s house are not the burning memory-images explored in Swann’s Way. The viewer is not permitted to fully grasp any image that appears before them, they remain unfathomable, impossible to completely assimilate to experience. In the darkness, a threat seems to lurk in every appearance — the ability to play with objects of memory is severed. The experience of the film becomes the terrifying dumb repetition of the sensuous manifold, rather than the purposeful repetition of play that would allow us to overcome the fearful quality of things by coming to know them, converting them into objects of experience. 

Previously the haunted house story was reserved for the haute bourgeois, as the small dwellings of the proletariat and petit bourgeois were not large enough for spirits to hide. Massification, which popularized the cinema, also massified the haunted house, as the winding corridors of suburban housing were sufficient to hide new spirits. The experience of the technically exact but senseless layouts of modern suburban architecture seems to mimic the experience of Nature in antiquity: “what could have made this?”

To combat modernity’s new spirits, children in mass society must conjure up the powers of old to vanquish what terrorizes them every night as they attempt to sleep. These are the powers of the occult. Toys, lights, and the television screen act as magic wards for children against demonic forces present in the home. This magic power is immediately felt by the viewer as when early on, Kaylee and Kevin turn on the TV and gather their toys in the living room. The living room develops the feeling of a Resident Evil safe-room. The danger is if they leave.

But as childhood occultic items, these things offer the potential to betray their masters. The film’s first scare is Kaylee stumbling on a Barbie doll on the ceiling. Yet she doesn’t scream when she sees what should not be, but rather when gravity finally decides to act on the doll, allowing it to fall to the floor — the fear that the object is leaping out at her. Toys can be terrifying objects in the dark to children when they feel they have less of an ability to master them. The fear always lingers that they might come alive and turn the tables. In alienation, the subject-object reversal contains within it the past belief in spirits and demons. What happens when our powers to defeat the terrors of childhood become insufficient for the world confronting us?

The origin of technology, including toys, is occultic. The spirits of old in animistic religion were not predominantly terrifying, but were a way of grasping a world which seemed to be animated by invisible forces. Learning the demon’s name gives one control over it. Technology originally posed the possibility of using these forces — forces which were really a way of grasping the world — for one's own purposes. The repossession of technology by the spirits it originally intended to subjugate reveals that the potential latent in this technology has not been realized. 

The reassertion of the phantom quality of technology unveils that our relation to the world we ourselves have created has developed a resonance with animistic societies. Our world appears to us as external and uncontrollable, a phenomenon historically described by Marxism as alienation. Modern haunted house stories attempt to grasp this alienation by explicitly illustrating the subjectivity of capitalism. But if we’re haunted by objects of our own creation, this is necessarily self-haunting, self-alienation. The demonic force lurking deep in the suburban home is itself an externalization of the child it haunts.

How does the child intervene in a world in which they seem to have no control? Play. Yet, adults intervene in the world of play by giving the child toys. Children don't need the adults’ toys to play, they can just as easily make their own mediums — the imposition of toys by the adults is part of what gives them a scary quality. How can our instruments, e.g. our toys, betray us? The answer lies in the question, do we play with toys or do we play through toys? Are toys mediums for the magical activity of play? Or do we play with them like we play with a friend? Psychologically, this is the entrance of the toy as something scary. Heterogenous force makes the toy appear before the child. Legos, prominently featured as a kind of comfort blanket in the film, are comforting because it is exceedingly obvious that we play through them rather than play with them. Half the pleasure of legos is tearing down our creations — play is not just constructive but destructive. The Fisher Price phone, a jumpscare late in the film, is scary because it seems to have life of its own.

Much of the film’s terror plays upon disappearing items, doors and people — in between being asleep and awake, your room can transform. “It’s my room but it’s also not.”

“For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness. And even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they had looked like, had collected sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke.”

The discrepancy between how things are and how they should be and the moment of recognition of this difference is often where dream transforms to nightmare. The same can be said of the cognition of the waking world, the realization that things are not as they should be is the entrance of horror, and this is precisely the zone Skinamarink plays with in its transformation of the house, its objects and eventually its inhabitants. For us however, the moment of the recognition of dissonance between how things are and how they should be is often repressed, hence the importance of dreams which allow us to recognize this clearly. Kaylee not screaming upon finding the doll on the ceiling, is founded upon the hope that “this is just how things are supposed to be.” The doll falling to the floor dashes this hope. The verification of prior experience becomes not relieving but horrifying, as this verification reveals that things really are not as they should be.

The need for the verification of normalcy finds its mirror in the experience of the film itself in the theater. The mass viewing of film rests upon the authoritarian anticipation of the response of other viewers to mirror the appropriate — “normal” — way to respond. But the long brooding scenes of hallways and doorframes denies this as the audience collectively holds their breath. Jumpscares eventually become relieving, simply to get the verification that others are by one’s side through the form of gasps and nervous laughter.

The jumpscares begin to have the quality that Benjamin described with regard to play: “Do it again!”

“We know that for a child repetition is the soul of play, that nothing gives him greater pleasure than to "Do it again!" … every profound experience longs to be insatiable, longs for return and repetition until the end of time, and for the reinstatement of an original condition from which it sprang. "All things would be resolved in a trice I If we could only do them twice." Children act on this proverb of Goethe's. Except that the child is not satisfied with twice, but wants the same thing again and again, a hundred or even a thousand times. This is not only the way to master frightening fundamental experiences — by deadening one's own response, by arbitrarily conjuring up experiences, or through parody; it also means enjoying one's victories and triumphs over and over again, with total intensity. An adult relieves his heart from its terrors and doubles happiness by turning it into a story. A child creates the entire event anew and starts again right from the beginning… the transformation of a shattering experience into habit… is the essence of play.” — “Toys and Play” (1928), Walter Benjamin

This finds its climax with a final jumpscare, Kevin’s “death.” From behind a darkened corner blood splatters onto the floor, accompanied by a scream. But then the footage reverses and the veiled death is seen again and again, suddenly the scream turns to laughter! Dying becomes something to be rehearsed and played out. Children play at death all the time. They also play at disappearing. They pretend to be invisible, to be a ghost. Being a ghost means playing at being “there” and “not there” at the same time.

There’s a moment when the television as a magical object turns against the children and viewers, where a moment from Chuck Jones' Prest-O Change-O (1939) — which shows a rabbit making itself disappear by parenthesizing itself between its hands, then clasping them together into nothing — begins to loop on the television. This same kind of (self-)disappearance later becomes the fate of one of the kids. 

The fear of disappearing is about the fear of making oneself disappear, alienated to a heterogenous force. The wonder of old cartoons, the ability to transfigure reality itself in the simplest way, also contains its apparent opposite: the horror of the magical ability to make oneself disappear, symptomatic of our own incomplete self-mastery. “What if I drove into this oncoming train?” Fear and desire — when Kaylee disappears in the same fashion as Prest-O Change-O’s rabbit, the power to make oneself magically disappear is displaced into the power of the demonic entity who claims the ability to “do anything.” Yet who is it that can really do anything? Freedom becomes terrible once displaced outside of ourselves into things. The untamed forces we’ve unleashed whose origin really resides in ourselves, might dissolve us at any time. Perhaps because we might in fact want it to. 

“[Mickey Mouse’s] life is full of miracles – miracles that not only surpass the wonders of technology, but make fun of them. For the most extraordinary thing about them is that they all appear, quite without any machinery, to have been improvised out of the body of Mickey Mouse, out of his supporters and persecutors, and out of the most ordinary pieces of furniture, as well as from trees, clouds, and the sea. Nature and technology, primitiveness and comfort, have completely merged.” — “Experience and Poverty” (1933), Walter Benjamin

What Benjamin identified in Mickey Mouse was not merely the “tremendous relief to find a way of life in which everything is solved in the simplest and most comfortable way, in which a car is no heavier than a straw hat and the fruit on the tree becomes round as quickly as a hot-air balloon” — i.e. the dream of a technology no longer alienated from us — but also how he represented a coping mechanism against a world that had grown completely overwhelming, both in its potential and danger. 

In Mickey Mouse films and other cartoons of its era, “it is not worthwhile to have experiences,” because these experiences will not in fact prepare the atomized individual for an ever-fluctuating world which will immediately invalidate that experience. That these old cartoons are put to use as an ancestral magic ward to protect Kaylee, Kevin and the audience, is not merely the deployment of fashionable nostalgia. It means our wariness against all experience has become our sole homogenous experience, the naturalization of fear. We’ve experienced everything and nothing, because our experience is no longer something we ourselves participate in, but seems to just happen to us — reality and our experience of it becomes a toy we play with rather than play through.

Upon disrupting the equilibrium of the living room the entity chimes in to say “I want to play.” But this doesn’t merely rerun an old trope (Saw), but asks of Kevin and the audience for sympathetic identification. The children and audience both identify with themselves/each other but also the entity in the home as a magic attempt to control the heterogenous demonic force by appealing to its whims. 

“My readers will remember the case of the little girl who tried by means of magic gestures to get over the mortification associated with her penis-envy. The child was purposely and consciously making use of a mechanism to which the boy resorted voluntarily. At home she was afraid to cross the hall in the dark, because she had a dread of seeing ghosts. Suddenly, however, she hit on a device which enabled her to do it: she would run across the hall, making all sorts of peculiar gestures as she went. Before long, she triumphantly told her little brother the secret of how she got over her anxiety. ‘There’s no need to be afraid in the hall,’ she said, ‘you just have to pretend that you’re the ghost who might meet you.’ This shows that her magic gestures represented the movements which she imagined that ghosts would make.

We might be inclined to regard this kind of conduct as an idiosyncrasy… but it is really one of the most natural and widespread modes of behavior on the part of the primitive ego and has long been familiar to those who have made a study of primitive methods of invoking and exorcizing spirits and of primitive religious ceremonies. Moreover there are many children’s games in which through the metamorphosis of the subject into a dreaded object anxiety is converted into pleasurable security.” — “Identification with the Aggressor” (1936), Anna Freud

Tropes are tropes for a reason. The demon who wants to play displaces the childhood coping mechanism of mimetic identification into the exterior object children always imagined it to be. The toy being played with seems to demand play, play becomes not just desired but a fearful imperative, for if the imagined demands of the toy go unanswered who knows what might happen? Embodied here too is the fear of the pact between playmates being broken. Play is not simply children being possessed, but something they can step in and out of at any time. When one playmate no longer wants to play and the other proceeds, the inability to communicate sanely is terrifying, as the child is confronted with someone truly outside themselves. 

This is not the only trope which finds itself repurposed — when Kaylee and Kevin must go upstairs into their parents’ room at the entity’s command, the typical audience imposition of, “don’t do that,” doesn't apply here in the same way. Following the entity's commands becomes more straightforwardly about identifying with the force one does not understand. Kevin asking "How did you do that?" and "What is your name?" to the entity are psychologically loaded statements. It’s strange when Kevin tries to speak with the entity, because like with the doll on the ceiling, when the entity provokes these responses, screaming in terror seems more immediately appropriate. For Kevin, the demon revealing its name would give him control over it. Naming is the first form of mastery. The title of the film is the magic ward given to the audience to defend against the terror in the film. That the demon doesn't reveal its name to Kevin spells his doom.

The entity commands Kaylee and Kevin to “go to sleep,” before their fates are sealed. In the absence of parents, this parental ordinance can come only from oneself. It's no coincidence that the mother appears to be absent before the movie even begins. Amid incomplete development, a heterogenous force must be introduced to deliver the commands of the parents. Kaylee is punished by the entity, supposedly because she “wanted to see her parents.” She failed to play the role of her own parents, so the entity, acting as superego, punished her by removing her face. 

The scene of Kaylee entering her parent’s room might be the scariest in the entire film. Before her are the legs of her father, who proceeds to ask her to look under the bed. The roles of parent and child are reversed: now the daughter must play parent by checking under mommy and daddy’s bed for monsters. When she looks up, her mother has returned, now sitting on the other side of the bed. The scene is awash in a terrifying ambivalence. The return of both parents is comforting, and Kaylee doesn’t want to leave her mother, yet their return is precisely what is so unnatural. Something is obviously wrong. Both their disappearance and reappearance instills fear and desire in equal measure. Precisely what the characters and audience would like most of all — for everything to return to "normal" — becomes the most terrifying possibility, because by invalidating what came before, it would show something truly is wrong. Kaylee’s mother asks her to close her eyes. When she opens them again, she’s gone — the fear that all might disappear in sleep, or that one’s playmates might disappear forever in an all too successful game of hide-and-seek.

Towards the end of the scene, one can hear the sound of her parents having sex, the trauma of walking in on one’s parents having sex is interlinked with their disappearance — the mother’s absence, “did daddy hurt her?” Once again the lowest of kitsch formulae is retooled to access the absolute taboo. Kaylee’s punishment for seeing what she was not meant to see is having her face removed (a la the Adobe magic eraser tool). One of the first traumas — being weaned off the breast — finds its literalization as Kaylee is deprived of her mouth, the organ the baby uses to “have” the mother.

Kaylee’s mistake is not just as the demon said, “wanting to see her parents,” but as the scene ends in a long-held-in scream, it stems from showing her fear in the face of it/herself. She lost the game of identification, she didn’t want to play anymore. Exhibiting fear admits something is amiss — Kaylee shows fear and opens herself up to destruction. The ideal identification with the entity is acting as though nothing is wrong — "go to sleep." But following the exterior ordinance to go to sleep is not self-mastery, it’s just the incorporation of the parent into oneself, including all the terror associated with one’s parents. To follow the parental decree to go to sleep is to submit to the fear/desire to disappear, to obey something outside oneself. For children and for we who have not attained to adulthood (“I’m adulting!”) the fear of sleep is interlinked with the fear of never opening one’s eyes again, that oneself and the entire world in tow will push its hands together into nothing. Unfreedom.

Freedom is the abolition of fear. For us in the realm of unfreedom, we experience fear ambivalently — for us it is co-manifest with desire. The horror film is enjoyable because it allows us to experience fear safely in a world that is itself constituted by fear. The fear that horror films present is supposedly masterable — in some ways they exist as training for a world that must delegate and manage its own inherent terror without overcoming it in reality. Yet so many people have described Skinamarink as too scary. This is fundamentally important, for if the realm of the mastery of fear has been overwhelmed — childhood and its de facto double, cinema — it poses the possibility that Skinamarink is refracting what has become truly taboo, the incomplete nature of our own development. It poses our own subjective inadequacy for the world we ourselves have constructed, and the necessity of changing ourselves and that world.

The exclamation that “we all lived the same childhood!” has become common parlance among those generations which have recently come to adulthood. Critical thinking however can have no truck with a statement so close-ended in its immediacy, the immediate affirmation of the homogeneity of experience. Benjamin would occasionally employ two counterposed categories: childishness, related to what adults inflict on children with their toys and deformed ideas of childhood; and the child-like, referring to the open moment of play. That we all lived the same childhood is descriptive of the success of the culture industry in homogenizing the world inflicted upon children, the dominant childishness of everything. The real task would be recovering the child-like, recovering open play: repetition which would educate and allow one to grasp the world, rather than that dumb repetition of repetition which merely mirrors our own experience of the world as an ever-changing endless ocean washing over and drowning its victims. Open play would be the dress rehearsal for the true mastery of the relationship between ourselves and the exterior world. Until then, fear abounds!