After an amazing buzz on the internet (following the leak film on canvas), The House – or Skinamarink of his original title – landed in France on the Shadowz platform after a brief Parisian session. Resolutely cleavage, he offered us our biggest annual freckle! Back to the phenomenon of current terror...
Experience at least
Two kids, dumped in a house. The absence of a mother. A father barely present. Drafts of a scenario emerging by decal of the plans of the beginning of Skinamarink, appearing in a handful of static planes like a frugal film. The minimalist lighting, the plans constantly trimming the action, the actors in inverted men-tricks whose face is (almost) never revealed to us and especially the grain of the image. This constant luminance noise, passing through Skinamarink aside, texturing the screen of this strange spectrum of pixels from which constantly seems to emerge the worst.
Look at the abyss...
Fixed plans, often long, parasitized by these persistent interferences, emerge doubts. First on the very architecture of the house, that the director Kyle Edward Ball manages perfectly to characterize while still removing the majority of the scene from the spectator. From the image sweats a strangeness gradually materializing. From the fixed plan that he forces us to search by length, the eye detects an aberration – a present door frame where there should not be one, a strange shadow, a bizarre architecture. But as soon as we see, the plan escapes us for the next, from just as banal appearance until a new singularity appears.
...the abyss also looks inside you.
And by this process, Skinamarink forces us to probe him. Every plan has been scrutinized. Every detail becomes dubious, every shadow a threatening silhouette, until the audience begins to create its own croque-mitaine! Previously strange plans gradually emanate a tangible threat, projected unconsciously by the public on screen. The murmurs of the two children, soon alone in this house, force us to raise the sound. Tender ear. The film tries to escape from the spectator to better jump on him, removes all his senses to attack him a hundredfold.
Then comes the moment when doubt is no longer possible. The windows disappear. The doors are moving. The shadows invade the rooms, barely disturbed by the strobe glow of a cathodic screen placed on the ground, the last distraction for the two children now abandoned to their own fate. The digestion has begun and the home dog is not ready to spit them out, when suddenly a voice – distorted, guttural – resonates from the floor.
The Croque-Mitaine
The two kids immediately attribute to the parental figure, irremediable absent, and one of them will dare climb the stairs. Graduation in horror, this scene marks the turning point of a disturbing film towards a purely terrifying film. A chamboulement materialized by a camera that passes from long fixed planes, sometimes very light travelling, to a camera carried at the height of a kid. Dropout underlined by this child's voice, filled with hope: Mom? Dad? And the film of getting to shake his spectator and make him immediately enter empathy with that kid whose, literally, we only saw a piece of legs...
And if the gradation in horror actually works in this room lost on the floor of this demonic house, it is that the film shoots at its reins. The jump scare window opens, but Kyle Edward Ball seems determined not to close it soon, creating the same tension that goes through the just as small budget Leading D.C.. The camera wanders into this room, taking in its cyclopean eye the spectator hostage. An agreed and almost masochistic hostage-taking – it would be enough to close your eyes – that the director did indeed anticipate when his character closed his eyelids. Then stay only the black screen, the parasites to the image and the sound, and the horror only makes it swollen.
Experimental horror
If it is undeniable that the experimental side of the film will ask its audience to let go of the most total – where, probably, the schism dug between the dithyrambic and disastrous opinions that it reaps – it goes without saying that it imposes on it an ultimate horror experience. By making the choice not to impose (or almost) horrific visual bestiary, he is content to cause the fears of the spectators to germinate which he himself will project on the screen.
A real cinema experience, far from the well harmless ghost trains offered by many current horrific blockbusters (Scream 6, Evil Dead Rise, Crazy Bear or very recently Hand etc.), which also proves to be by far the most notable horror film of the year so far. One more proof, if necessary, that the budget does not do everything: the feature film cost $15,000, about 4333 times less than the purge Renfield Inflated digital hemoglobin!
House of the lost leaves
A dive into a horror distillate, which would not have to blush in front of the first segment of Lost Highway... The ultimate work of David Lynch Indeed, already offered a condensation of fear in these equally noisy videos, received by the post office, where an unknown camera was wandering in the corridors of the main character's house. If the grain of the image and the troullometer bring the two works closer together, the sound design makes electrical buzzes and white noise will only emphasize a certain gemality with the work of the father of Mulholland Drive. However, the true inspiration of the film – as long as it could easily be seen as an unofficial adaptation – is to be sought from the side of La Maison des feuilles in a wonderful color edition at Mr Toussaint Louverture.
Indeed, the maboule work of Mark Z. Danielewski infuse each plan of this Skinamarink (after having influenced many films, including the recent and very good Relic of the Natalie Erika James). The deaf terror that one feels in the face of this book which constantly metamorphoses its layout as the house which he describes changes is the same feeling of vertigo that binds the belly of the spectator. Skinamarink. And if Danielewski uses everything the format can offer (white pages, insert images, moving texts, changing font, visible polyphonism...), Kyle Edward Ball is just as inventive with his feature film. Play with silence and subtitles, upside down, gradual destabilization of any spatial and temporal landmark to deepen the abyss facing which the spectator is at the very end of the film.
« Before I made my YouTube series, I made a short horror film that I thought people wanted to see, but I didn't really want to make. And then I found out that people didn't really want to see it. I learned after that point that what the audience wants to see and what you want to make are currently more similar than you! »
A director who has already dug the genre through his YouTube channel (which one can only advise you to discover, an example above): Bitesized Nightmares. Let yourself be tempted by this Skinamarink on Shadowz Hey! Far from the productions soon seen, soon forgotten, the film offers a slow terror, which will infuse in your blood a true distillate of nightmare.
He looks very cool but I reserve it on large screen on my pro video at home! For when I'm back from the fight.
In any case a viewing in the dark and at a time when full availability is required ^^
Given the voice message I received from my brother last night in the middle of the Canadian storm, I think he's really messing with this movie. You were right!
Since in the countryside some of the thunderstorms ended in a power cut then yes I was a little nervous when the film ended around midnight and the thunder was rumbling out!
Otherwise I really liked the film, especially its production, I found that we were almost in experimental in some respects. It's also so often dark that it's like it's on the high seas, in the blurred blue of the ocean, except that here it's dark and we try to guess forms that sometimes are only in our head. Like when you're groping in the dark.
I was less afraid (sentiment subjective) than in front of It Follows or Hereditary to quote the last two movies to have really scared to the point of having nightmares. But sweet Jesus is hard not to be impressed by the ultra claustrophobic staging and which gives the impression that these poor kids are absolutely trapped in another dimension by a demon with a great D, the genre that feeds on the fear of its hosts, as in a sleep paralysis. It's kind of like they're being digested by the house.
Anyway, what's for sure is that I've never seen anything like it. I would also advise to look at him one night when he was in shape because I was tired of my day when I started him late and seeing that there are long silences and that it is voluntarily a slow rhythm, it may have affected my immersion because I was just tired.
Hasten to see what the director will do next.
A particularly experimental work. I love it! 🙂
[...] horror distributed by A24 entitled La Main (Talk to Me in original version). After the Skinamarink shock, what is this summer horrific production worth? Answer to read [...]