Gregg Araki on the ‘Raw Nerve’ of Abuse ‘Mysterious Skin’ Still Hits: ‘You Leave That Movie Literally Traumatized’

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The 21st century has seen any number of films about the stories people tell themselves in order to rationalize and reconfigure their trauma, but none have been more raw or powerfully true to life than “Mysterious Skin.”

Nineties indie icon Gregg Araki took great risk in adapting Scott Heim’s 1995 novel, the story of a teen hustler who, drawn exclusively to older men as an adult, comes to terms with the fact that his Little League coach groomed and raped him as a child over one summer in 1981 Kansas, and how his sexual behavior later in the ’90s was shaped by those encounters as a result. While Neil McCormack ( Joseph Gordon-Levitt ) engages in reckless sexual activity, elsewhere a fellow teammate, Brian Lackey ( Brady Corbet ), who was also abused by the same coach, retreats into fantasies of alien abduction to drown out the same traumas.

“The parts of ‘Mysterious Skin’ that to me are the truest, the rawest, and the most authentic and what make it so special are the scenes that are super disturbing and things you haven’t seen before,” Araki told IndieWire. And indeed, the film, which premiered in Venice in 2004, shows us images that must have been incredibly difficult to shoot. Chase Ellison and George Webster play the younger, preadolescent versions of Neil and Brian as they are molested by their coach (Bill Sage). In Neil’s case, he believes as a teenager through a warped lens of self-denial that it was a kind of love, not abuse, he was experiencing. It’s when Neil leaves Kansas for New York City, where he joins his best friend Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg), that repressed memories awaken as he goes deeper into the city’s sex-for-pay demimonde.

“Mysterious Skin” opens a rare window into the complexities of the trauma wrought from childhood sexual abuse — how it informs our behaviors into adulthood, and how we delude ourselves into reframing the worst thing that can happen to anybody as something more fantastical than it was. In other words, the mechanism of processing trauma is much like Araki’s film, which endows its adapted material with a hallucinatory quality (most notable in the hyper-stylized scenes where the young kids are being abused, shot in head-on POV).

“It was insane how much we made that movie for because it was 35mm, it had little kids in it, it was period. [Though set in] Kansas and New York, we shot almost all of it here in L.A. except for a couple guerrilla things we did in the New York subway,” Araki said. “The vision of it was so uncompromising and so provocative and so disturbing, I knew that we’d never get $10 million or $15 million. We wouldn’t get Miramax to make this movie. We did it for like a million bucks in the very, very indie way.”

A huge hurdle for the shoot was casting the kids and convincing parents to agree to let their children participate in a movie about sexual abuse where the young actors would actually be in those scenes. The film’s producers included Mary Jane Skalski, and Araki said, “Her presentation to the parents was much better than [if coming from me] me or some other man or something.”

Araki described Heim’s novel — “the book was floating around my orbit for at least five years” before Araki took a crack at making it — as “unadaptable,” but “it just kept coming up in my life.” In 2000, Araki directed an MTV pilot for “This Is How the World Ends,” a series that never took off. But he became “very interested, and this comes from Jonathan Demme who talked about this a lot in regards to ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ in subjective POV, and eyelines to the camera, and how when characters are looking directly to the camera, you’re in the place of the protagonist, and it becomes a different experience than when you’re over the shoulder. It becomes much more direct. It was really that idea that all the sudden opened a door for me for ‘Mysterious Skin.'”

So Araki found a way to shoot “Mysterious Skin” “where the kids are in another movie almost, and you just use their looks to camera. You have them looking directly at the camera, and then you have the other character [the coach] also looking at the camera.” It was that “editing trick” that made the movie possible. (Araki did his own editing here.)

“We had to cast the kids and then talk to the parents about [how] ‘this is what we have planned, and this is how we’re going to shoot it,’” Araki said. “We were very specific with the parents. I had storyboards [to say] this is how we’re going to shoot this. The subject matter is so dark, and it was a very heavy movie to shoot, especially some of the later intense scenes.”

But the experience of “Mysterious Skin” turned out to be more grueling for the adults involved — especially as star Gordon-Levitt is brutally raped later on, an uncompromising and even traumatizing scene Araki’s film has become synonymous with.

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“We shot in the summertime, and the kids just had the best summer ever. They were so excited to be on a movie set, and they just had a great time. They were such great natural actors. The kids just had a blast. Meanwhile, we were working our asses off to make it happen,” Araki said. “So many parents passed, so many kids didn’t come in.”

Looking back on the scene where one of Neil’s older tricks beats and rapes him in a bathroom, Araki said, “I look on that day going, ‘I don’t really know how we made it through.’”

He added, “There’s a version of ‘Mysterious Skin’ that’s R-rated or even PG-rated, where the door’s closing [before the abuse is shown], the violins are playing. It’s the raw naked moments in ‘Mysterious Skin’ that you’ve never seen before and kind of can’t imagine seeing, and then once you see them, can’t unsee them. Those are the moments that make ‘Mysterious Skin ‘worth making. The TV movie version of that movie is not worth making because it’s been made before.”

Araki said, “I was abused as a child and none of [the other movies about child sexual abuse are like] ‘Mysterious Skin’ because it really put you in the ringer of it. And you’re not just an outside observer, just like, ‘Oh, this is terrible. I feel so bad for these characters.’ It was really like, ‘This is fucking happening, and the way it shot, this is happening to me.’ You leave that movie literally traumatized. And that’s, I think, what makes it so unique.”

The movie will celebrate its 20th anniversary proper next year, two decades after TLA Releasing debuted “Mysterious Skin” unrated in ultimately just 19 theaters to a worldwide box office of more than $2 million. Impressive given the content, and how it has awakened the audiences’ own traumas even today as “Mysterious Skin” replays in repertory screenings.

“So many people have come up to me after screenings of that movie and because they’ve been abused, it’s so, so triggering. That’s what’s so sophisticated about the source material, that there is a level of denial, what the Brian character goes through where he transposes his experience into another experience. There are so many mechanisms the brain has to suppress the memory or bury or reinterpret it or make it not so raw or ‘oh my god this fucking happened’… The movie exposes the nerve again, for better or worse, and makes you realize what happened,” Araki said.

But in addition to writing the screenplay version of Heim’s novel, Araki did research of his own to grasp the maddening statistics of sexual abuse. “There’s this outrageous number of people who’ve been sexually abused. It’s something like one in four. It’s an insane amount of people. The idea that you’re sitting at a dinner table, a dozen people, and three people at the table have been sexually abused. It’s so common and so prevalent, and it’s such a deep wound you never really recover from. That’s one of the beautiful things about the movie. Those characters do carry it.”

By the end of “Mysterious Skin,” Neil and Brian are drawn together inexplicably at first until the reality of their past explains how they reconvene as teenagers. The cathartic healing, perhaps all that is possible for two people who will indeed carry this with them the rest of their lives, is emboldened by the now-iconic use of Sigur Ros’ “Samskeyti” as the last song heard in a movie. A soundtrack already dotted by the likes of Slowdive and the Cocteau Twins, conjuring a purely Arakian ’90s vibe and sending some quadrants of the audience back to a certain time and place.

“That Sigur Ros song killed me because I remember when we were editing the movie, I put that in there [in post-production] because they were just coming out at that time, and I loved that song so much,” Araki said. “I put it in, like, ‘Oh my god, what are we going to do? This song is so perfect for the fucking movie. If we don’t get it, I don’t know what we’re going to do.’ It was very intense because I had to write the band and beg — we already didn’t have any money, and it was just very ‘please, please please, we have to have this song.’ Luckily, they said yes. Thank god.”