Mysterious Skin tells the story of two pre-adolescent boys who are sexually abused by their baseball coach, and how it affects their lives in different ways into their young adulthood. One boy becomes a reckless, sexually adventurous male prostitute, while the other retreats into a reclusive fantasy of alien abduction. The film is a 2004 Dutch-American drama film directed by American filmmaker Gregg Araki, who also wrote the screenplay based on Scott Heim’s 1996 novel of the same name. The film is Araki’s eighth, premiering at the 61st Venice International Film Festival in 2004, although it was not more widely distributed until 2005.
