Every Jumpscare In Skinamarink (& Their Timestamps)

Summary Skinamarink is a unique and nightmare-inducing horror film with few but impactful jumpscares throughout.

The film's eerie cinematography and sound design create a suffocating atmosphere that replicates a bad dream.

Each jumpscare, from a menacing toy phone to a blood splatter, leaves a lasting imprint of terror on the viewer.

2022's Skinamarink is a frightening film, but its jumpscare sequences are few and far between, making the times they do happen all the more effective. A Canadian experimental independent horror movie, Skinamarink is one of the strangest movies of the genre in recent memory. It follows two siblings, Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), who wake up one night to find that their father is gone, as are the windows and doors to their house.

Skinamarink is a difficult movie to compare to its contemporaries in the horror genre. Even modern horror movies that have flown under the radar have not matched the nightmare-like qualities of Skinamarink. What Skinamarink lacks in story and character development, it makes up for in a relentless and suffocating cinematography and sound design that truly replicates what it feels like to be having a bad dream. Like a nightmare, there are long stretches of the film that are incomprehensible and last for a long time, but when jumpscares do happen, the wait makes them feel even more frightening.

Related Skinamarink’s Kevin Is In A Coma For The Entire Movie - Theory Explained Skinamarink’s plot may be unclear but Kevin and his sister certainly seem trapped inside a nightmare in this lo-fi experimental Canadian horror film.

Kaylee Drops Her Flashlight

00:35:25

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It's a very unusual horror movie that takes over half an hour to get to its first jumpscare and the long buildup in Skinamrink means the director, first-timer Kyle Edward Ball, doesn't have to do all that much to make the audience flinch. The ominous tone is set early in Skinamarink and the odd, paranormal events increase slowly like a rising tide rather than one big wave after another. Around the 35-minute mark, the first-floor commode disappears. The children run upstairs to use the other one and Kaylee's flashlight lands on a naked toy doll, floating in the air.

There's no sound and the camera doesn't move for quite some time. Suddenly, Kaylee shrieks and drops the flashlight away from the doll so that it rolls away, casting a sickly yellow light on the shag carpet. It's unclear what happened with the doll, but the unknown makes her scream even more terrifying. Consider also that Kaylee, a very young girl, may have struggled to understand what she was looking at, screaming when she realized. It's a delayed fear response many will have experienced in a nightmare.

A Hand On The Doorframe

00:47:20

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At $15,000 (via Deadline), Skinamarink's budget was minuscule, and with the low-fi, grainy shots, it shows. However, these visuals are also an effectively disturbing and unsettling way of making the viewer strain to see what is on-screen and what isn't. At the 47th minute, the camera focuses on a doorway that can only be half seen in the low lighting. In a split second, a large male hand comes from out of the dark and grabs the doorframe while a piercing shriek is heard.

It's either an effect of the footage style or the hand deliberately moves in a stop-motion-like way, but the odd angle it grips the door with and how there is barely a second for viewers to understand what it is they saw makes it a highly effective jumpscare. The way the hand suddenly pops onto the screen makes it feel as if it was always there and forces the viewer not to trust what they're watching, as the scene could change at any moment.

Kaylee's Face Changes

00:58:19

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A little over halfway through Skinamarink, there is one of the most terrifying jump scares in horror movies. The camera is trained on Kaylee, who is lying on her back, with the light only illuminating her arm and part of her torso. A jump cut brings Kaylee's face right into the camera as she stares at the viewer. But technically she can't stare, and calling it her face is a misrepresentation, because Kaylee's eyes and mouth are gone. They look like they've been wiped away, leaving streaky shadows where her features should be.

It's incredibly alarming and for those who have suffered the worst kind of nightmare that feels impossible to wake up from, the visage on screen will be reminiscent of those unknowable, but primordially terrifying things that are mostly forgotten once woken up. Her face is accompanied by a loud droning sound, making it all the more shocking. It's a jump scare that's sure to leave a long-lasting imprint late into the night.

The Toy Phone Rings

01:32:54

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The toy phone is one of the few props in Skinamarink that is clearly shown and revisited. This phone, the same kind in Toy Story 3 who warns Woody that everything at Sunnyside Daycare is not on the up-and-up, smiles at the camera throughout the movie, ringing occasionally. Late in the film, two frightening white orbs are shown peering out of a completely dark scene. A light clicks on to reveal those orbs are the eyes of the smiling telephone looking upwards happily, barely a relief.

The light clicks off immediately, as if the movie itself is too afraid to keep looking at the phone.

A loud, metallic ring is suddenly heard coming from the phone and, in a single frame, the toy's eyes shift to look directly at the camera with a distinctly more manic look and the smile of the phone grows wider. The light clicks off immediately, as if the movie itself is too afraid to keep looking at the phone. The white eyes continue staring out of the darkness, now trained on the viewer before the scene cuts.

Blood Splashes Onto The Floor

01:35:18

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Toward the ending of Skinamarink, Kevin is the only one left, Kaylee having disappeared to wherever her father went. Terrorized, terrified, and all alone, things get even more frightening for Kevin when blood suddenly splashes onto the floor in a shocking jumpscare, with the required screeching chords present as well. Kevin can be heard screaming through static, his echoes reverberating before the sound cuts out and the blood disappears as quickly as it appeared.

A strange organ plays, like one that may be heard at a baseball game, adding to the confusion and insanity. What's even more frightening is that it's unclear of whose blood it is. It's possibly Kevin's, as the demonic entity convinced him to stab himself in the eye, but it could also be part of the nightmare metaphor of the film itself. It's a terrifying jumpscare to end Skinamarink and the horror lingers long after the credits roll.