4 Years Before Backrooms, This Controversial Horror Film Brought Liminal Horror To The Big Screen And Made 1 Huge Mistake
When Kane Parson’s Backrooms was released earlier this year, it was many people’s first foray into liminal horror. Though the subgenre has been around since at least 2019, if not longer, it was the success of Parson’s Backrooms YouTube series that popularized the concept before the Backrooms film would bring it to the mainstream. A box office hit for A24, Backrooms set a number of records, bringing in over $395 million worldwide on a meager $10 million budget. While Backrooms is now the most popular liminal horror film to date, it wasn’t the first film to explore the terror of transitional spaces. A few years ago, an indie Canadian horror film released in theaters that also delved into the same uncanny valley of deserted spaces, with much different results. While the two films explored similar themes of horror and isolation, one huge mistake meant the difference between mainstream success and cult classic status.
Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink hit theaters in 2022 and immediately garnered cult attention as one of the most terrifying films of the year. Skinamarink is set in a single home over the course of what seems to be an endless night, as two children wake up to find their parents missing and a malicious entity toying with them from the darkness. Audiences were immediately disturbed by the film’s bizarre perspective and how it turned familiar safe spaces like a child’s bedroom into a liminal space nightmare. However, large swathes of the audience found the horror of empty spaces completely unengaging and not scary in the slightest. The divide in audience reactions highlights what Skinamarink did wrong, that Backrooms got so right.
Skinamarink Builds Its Horror From the Unseen
Parsons began his Backrooms series on YouTube in 2019, inspired by a strange real estate photo posted to 4chan. From there, the liminal horror genre has exploded online, with countless backrooms fan projects and iterations. While Ball has never mentioned being inspired by Parsons’ work directly, it’s clear he was tapping into the same zeitgeist surrounding modern fears that Parsons was exploring. It’s well known that horror is a reflection of its times, and it’s apparent that Backrooms and Skinamarink both tap into the same disconnected anxiety and impersonal horror that some audiences find terrifying in our modern society. Skinamarink may have beaten Backrooms to the theaters, but both projects were laying the groundwork for what this genre could become.
Like Backrooms, Skinamarink relies on nostalgia and the familiar to disarm its audiences. The majority of the film is made up of drawn-out, anxious shots of empty space throughout the dimly lit home. A gravity-defying chair pressed up against the ceiling immediately draws parallels to the maddening furniture found in Backrooms. At one point in the indie film, the dark entity has twisted the house to such an extent that the floors and ceilings have become reversed, and a seemingly endless mess of LEGO bricks remains fixed to the floor above. This terrifying moment could just as easily have been in Backrooms, as it evokes the same cyclopean horror as Parsons’ film.
As much as the two films have in common, it’s the differences between the two where things get interesting. Where the Backrooms tortures its victims with endless fluorescent lights, Skinamarink is a never-ending maze of darkness, both visually and narratively. Rarely are the protagonists shown on screen; instead, you see the children’s toys being pushed around a carpet under the dim blue glow of the television, or hear their steps scurry across the carpet. You’ll occasionally hear them, but you’ll never see them speak. In this way, Skinamarink preys on childhood memories and feelings, allowing the audience’s own fears and traumas to slip in and fill the empty spaces of the film. Many fans describe the movie reminding them of when they were a child and woke up in the middle of the night to find their home silent and dark, almost familiar but completely alien.
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
It is often said less is more with horror, but Skinamarink gives so little that it can often feel like nothing is happening at all. For some, this bare-bones approach is incredibly effective. The specific kind of childhood horror this film depicts strikes a deep nerve in those for whom it resonates. But if that specific horror doesn’t hit for someone, if they don’t have that nerve in their body that is sensitive to this specific vision of scares, then they may have a very difficult time enjoying Skinamarink. For someone in that position, it’s a long film where seemingly nothing happens, and you can’t see much of anything at all. Audiences were heavily divided in their opinions, with a 44% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes reflecting this wide disparity. Extreme terror and extreme boredom seem to be the only two reactions anyone had. A common criticism was that Skinamarink felt more like an art installation than a movie, primarily focused on the vibes of being scary rather than telling a compelling narrative. To those unaffected by the film’s atmosphere, the meandering liminal space could not make up for the lack of characters or story to attach to.
This same principle holds true for Backrooms. Despite its praise, the yellow wallpaper and cyclopean hallways of the Backrooms simply were not scary for everyone in the audience. Where Parsons’ film makes up for that, however, was in its characters and the third act’s payoff. Skinamarink’s stars were only children, but the film didn’t even attempt to characterize them beyond that. They were simply vessels for the audience to project their childhood fears. Parsons went a different direction with Backrooms, putting great emphasis on the film’s two lead characters: the alcoholic Clark and his therapist Mary. Through their journey, audiences were able to latch onto something tangible and emotional to connect with, even if the liminal space horror didn’t click for them.
The appearance of the Pirate Clark monster at the film’s conclusion also left audiences with some semblance of a payoff to all the film’s buildup. Showing too much of the monster can often ruin a horror film, but in comparison to Backrooms, showing almost none of the monster did Skinamarink no favors. This is where Skinamarink failed while Backrooms succeeded. Kane Parson’s film explored the human angle to the terror, while Ball was content to focus squarely on the terror of the unknown in Skinamarink. While this was most certainly intentional on Kyle Edward Ball’s part, it held back his film from the greatness Backrooms would later achieve.
