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

Gregg Araki revisits 'Mysterious Skin' for IndieWire 2000s Week, explaining how the 2004 coming-of-age drama struck a raw nerve about child sex abuse.

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. ‘Mysterious Skin’ Tartan Releasing/courtesy Everett Collection 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.

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