The haunted house movie has had something of a resurgence in recent years, with Insidious and the Paranormal Activity franchise crafting original and effective spins on the popular sub-genre. And you can now add Sinister to that list, with the new horror from Exorcism of Emily Rose helmer Scott Derrickson pushing all the right buttons to scare the living daylights out of its audience.
Ethan Hawke plays Ellison Oswald, a true-crime writer who hit the jackpot with a book called Kentucky Blood some 10 years previous, and has been trying to replicate that success ever since.
He does so by moving his family to a small town in which a heinous crime with an unsolved mystery has taken place, documenting the police investigation - warts-and-all - and putting it down in book form before getting out while the going is good.
Sinister starts with Ellison taking this approach one step further, moving his family - unbeknownst to them - to a house in which a quadruple murder has recently taken place. Four members of the same family were hung from a tree, with the fifth - a little girl - now missing.
Needless to say, the local constabulary are unhappy with his arrival, but Ellison is a determined soul, and so presses on with his task, and when he finds a box of old home movies in the attic, he knows he is onto something.
Because the Super 8s contain horror of the most tragic kind, featuring footage of blissful family gatherings punctuated by that same clan's brutal murder. It's shocking stuff, but the kind of morbid mystery that Ellison has been desperately searching for in an effort to have another hit.
So rather than telling the police, he begins his own investigation into where the tapes came from, and what links them, with predictably devastating results.
It starts with the family beginning to break down, his wife doubting Ellison's motives, their daughter miserable in the new town; their son acting up at school and having night terrors at home.
But the content of the tapes soon start to take its toll on Ellison himself, the writer turning to drink to deal with the horrors therein, and even starting to question his own sanity as he delves deeper into the mystery.
And that's all we're saying on the story front, suffice to say that Sinister has a few twists and turns up its sleeves, as well as its fair share of scream-out-loud moments.
Some of them are of the lazy variety, with jump-scares in abundance, keeping the audience on their toes but lacking any sort of substance.
The home movie sequences are genuinely terrifying however, with director Derrickson filling the screen with disturbing imagery that's truly the stuff of nightmares, turning us into voyeurs as we in turn witness the actions of a voyeur on screen.
It's all anchored by a marvellous central performance from Ethan Hawke, who remains watchable and even sympathetic in spite of the fact that he's constantly putting his family in danger throughout the film.
Juliet Rylance fares less well as the long-suffering and woefully underwritten wife, although there are nice supporting performances from James Ransone as a somewhat eccentric police deputy and Vincent D'Onofrio as an academic specialising in the occult.
The deaths are imaginative, the score effective (though a little overbearing at times), and the final revelation, while somewhat underwhelming, does unify the story in a strangely satisfying way.
Kudos must therefore to Derrickson and his co-writer C. Robert Cargill for finding a new and original spin on the found footage genre at a time when the market is being saturated with such films, and making guilty voyeurs of us all.
So while Sinister is hardly a game-changer, it is an extremely effective horror feature; one that creates its own highly original mythology, and wholeheartedly terrifies from start-to-finish.
Sinister was the Secret Screening at the 2012 SXSW Festival, and will hit screens worldwide in October.
Source : ign[dot]com
