The Found-Footage Horror Hit That Gives Up on Its Own Best Idea

Scott Derrickson’s Sinister has one of the great horror premises of the 2010s and spends most of its 110 minutes failing to trust it. Ethan Hawke plays Ellison Oswalt, a true-crime writer more than a decade past his one best seller, who moves his family into the Pennsylvania house where the previous owners were murdered by hanging. He does not tell his wife Tracy or his kids. That is the movie. A man who needs a hit so badly he will live inside a crime scene, and a supernatural force waiting in the attic for him to finish the research.

Trailer, via Blumhouse.

The Box in the Attic

The hook is a box of Super 8 reels Ellison finds upstairs, labeled as home movies. They are not. Each one shows a family killed in a different way — drowned in a pool, locked in a car and set on fire — filmed by whoever did it. Ellison thinks about handing them to the police, then decides his career is worth more than that. It is a sharp, ugly character beat, and Hawke sells it without flinching.

The production detail behind those reels is the best thing in the film. Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill shot the found-footage segments on actual Super 8 cameras and film stock, and the texture shows. Grainy, silent, badly lit — the tapes have the look of something recovered rather than staged, and that is the point. The 2012 film cost $3 million and looks like it cost more.

“Once you see him, nothing can save you.”

Mr. Boogie and the Missing Children

Ellison links one reel to the 1998 murder of the Miller family in St. Louis and the disappearance of their 13-year-old son, Christopher. He finds a king snake inside the film canister lid, plus childlike drawings of the killings featuring a figure called Mr. Boogie. He falls through the ceiling. A deputy arrives, jokes his way into the nickname Deputy So-and-So, and becomes the closest thing Ellison has to an ally.

James Ransone plays that deputy, and he is the only person in the movie having any fun. Fred Thompson turns up as the sheriff. Vincent D’Onofrio appears, uncredited, as Professor Jonas, the occult expert who explains what Mr. Boogie is. Juliet Rylance plays Tracy, Clare Foley plays Ashley Oswalt and Michael Hall D’Addario plays Trevor Oswalt, and in my reading the film hands the three of them little to do beyond being endangered.

A Schedule Built to Scare

Sinister rolled out slowly, and the pattern is worth seeing laid out:

The money worked. Sinister grossed $87.7 million against its $3 million budget, a return that led to that sequel. Critics at the time praised the acting, the direction, the cinematography and the atmosphere, and knocked the jump scares and the horror clichés. My own view is that both reactions are fair.

The Case for Sinister, and Against It

Here is the split. Sinister has since developed a reputation for scariness and is considered a cult classic, and a 2020 study by Broadband Choices named it the scariest film ever made, based on an analysis of viewer heart rates. That is a real finding and a real marketing gift. But as criticism, I would argue heart-rate data measures the startle, not the dread. A loud noise in a quiet room will spike a pulse. That does not make it good.

The startles are the problem. Sinister has a genuinely disturbing idea — a pagan entity that feeds on families and takes their children, documented on film by the children themselves — and then, in my reading, keeps interrupting it with things jumping out of the dark. The attic, the hallway, the lawn. Each one, to my eye, resets the tension to zero. The Super 8 reels are patient and quiet and awful. The rest of the movie is not.

What holds it together is Hawke. Ellison is a selfish man, and the film knows it. He keeps the tapes. He moves his family into a murder house and lies about it. He is chasing the book that will make him relevant again, and the movie lets him be small about it. When the supernatural force closes in, it is not punishing an innocent. It is collecting a man who already traded his family for a draft.

The supporting cast is the weak link. As I see it, D’Onofrio’s Professor Jonas exists to deliver exposition and nothing else, and the scene plays like a lecture. Rylance’s Tracy comes across as a woman who notices nothing until the plot requires her to notice everything. The kids register as props. For a movie about a family being stalked, the family is thinly drawn.

Sinister was inspired by a nightmare Cargill had after watching the 2002 film The Ring. You can feel that lineage — the cursed footage, the investigation, the slow realization that the protagonist is already doomed. In my judgment Sinister is not as good as The Ring, though it never sets out to match it. It is a $3 million genre exercise that found an image worth being afraid of: a home movie of a family dying, filmed by someone standing just off camera. That image, to this paper, carries the film. The rest reads as scaffolding.

Ethan Hawke · horror movie review · jump scares · Scott Derrickson · Sinister · Super 8