October Horror 2012: Sinister

This movie didn't make the official list this year, but the previews looked really good and the festival circuit enjoyed it so we went out to a theater to see it.  Aside from a pretty vapid middle aged housewife who insisted on narrating everything that was happening on screen to her husband, who tried valiantly to make her stop, the audience was very good.


Sinister's plot centers around a true-crime writer, Ellison Oswald (Ethan Hawke) and his family, who move into a house in rural Pennsylvania while Ellison researches and writes his next novel.  Ellison has been in a bit of slump since his breakthrough hit "Kentucky Blood" and hopes his next book will put him back on top so he can retire and his family can live happily ever after. Soon, he finds a box of super 8 reels and a small projector labelled "Home Movies".  Each tape is titled with some innocuous phrase like "backyard BBQ" or "pool party", but they contain recordings of brutal family murders where the method of execution is a pun on the title.  As he watches these tapes to uncover the mystery, weirder and weirder things keep happening to him and his family.

Ellison is having a really tough time of the whole thing even outside of the haunting because his family is so absurdly antagonized by the nature of Ellison's work, they've instituted a set of strict rules involving his office which they joke about.  They have a son who suffers from sleep-walking and night terrors and a pretty normal seeming daughter who really enjoys painting, but prefers walls to canvas.  All indications are Ellison is a man who is, for all his want of money, devoted to his family and committed to keeping them safe.  Which makes it really odd that his wife constantly gives him crap over his choice of genre.  She has a tendency to support him one moment while using the same breath to deliver an ultimatum.  Aside from that issue the characters are all pretty real feeling which helps this sort of movie.

The movie itself is directed by Scott Derrickson who also directed The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which is one of my all-time favorite movies.

Sinister, I think, is probably going to be one of the better new releases this year.  It's respectful of the audience in the way that no characters really ever show up to spell out exactly what the backstory of anyone is or what the latest discovery in the central mystery is.  The conversations feel very natural, like people actually talking about things they know instead of exposition via As-You-Know-Bob.  They expect that if you've been following along you're intelligent enough to make the same breakthrough as the characters are at any step along the way.  It's also very deliberate and Insidious-like in the way it approaches its scares.  While it's heavy on jump scares they have psychological weight to them and the movie builds to them slowly and deliberately.  Another thing that's really good in here is the lack of false scares.  They will have situations where the movie is building tension and then appears to reveal something, but it's not done with a soundtrack punctuation or quick editing so the build up isn't broken and the fake out has just served to get you on edge expecting the scare.

The super 8 tapes are a really good use of traditional found footage, incorporated into a narrative instead of the whole movie being "found".  Another bit that I really liked about it was the way they used a super 8-like feel during the supernatural scenes, where the frames stutter and skip slightly like they're being played back on an old reel-to-reel, sort of blurring the lines somewhat as the demon pulled the family closer to his world.

This movie is really good.  I wish it was as good as Insidious, and while it doesn't go totally off the rails in the 3rd act like Insidious did it's not quite as good in the bits before that which keep it from hitting that level, but it is solid and very scary.