Taste and personal preference are entirely subjective, and that sentiment arguably rings truer for horror than any other genre. For one of the more recent notable examples, look no further than last year’s Skinamarink, which was loved and loathed in equal measure.
Following a string of festival screenings, buzz rapidly began to build around writer and director Kyle Edward Ball’s supernatural terror, with a leaked copy being uploaded onto the internet. As a result, social media quickly latched onto the film and deemed it to be one of the scariest things ever made, which may have done just as much harm as it did good.
The positive is that Skinamarink was an immensely profitable venture that recouped its budget almost 150 times over after bringing in $2.1 million on shoestring production costs of $15,000, but the downside was that a lot of excited audience members were left crushingly disappointed by what they ended up seeing, with its viral status backfiring somewhat after two opposing camps emerged claiming it was either one of the greatest or one of the worst films in the history of spooky cinema.
Obviously, that’s an opinion destined to vary from viewer to viewer, but we can at least infer that it could be a point of contention all over again as we inch closer to Halloween. Per FlixPatrol, the micro-budget nightmare with a 72 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, 44 percent user rating, 4.9/10 on IMDb, and respective rankings of 66 and 5.1 on Metacritic has returned on the Google Play charts, reopening the doors to the conversation on its merits, or lack thereof.