Christian’s Grade: A
Okay, I’ll be the one guy who says it. I didn’t like Insidious (2010). It’s not that it was an awful movie. It wasn’t. It just didn’t strike any chord with me. It was basically a deeper dive into Poltergeist (1982), where you get a better look at “the other side.” I just wasn’t buying it as a legitimately scary movie. I’m picky when it comes to horror films. Sinister (2012), on the other hand, I found to be extremely creepy and disturbing. That’s why I love it.
Ethan Hawke plays Ellison Oswalt, a novelist suffering from writer’s block. After gaining huge success from publishing a true crime novel, he’s trying to find inspiration for his next book. Pressure and expectations are high, as is his desire for fame, fortune, and relevancy. Hoping to overcome his block, Ellison decides to move to a small town with his family and seclude himself in the house where the terrible murder he is researching took place, unbeknownst to his wife and kids. While settling into the house, Ellison discovers a box of old film reels and a projector. Each reel has a strange and cryptic title. Out of curiosity, Ellison loads one up and begins to watch alone in his study. It starts out as a typical home movie of a family enjoying themselves. Halfway through, the film cuts to a sequence where the family is brutally murdered. This content catches Ellison off guard and shocks him. Is what he saw some elaborate stagecraft, or did he just view evidence of the murder he’s researching?
Ellison becomes obsessed with these films and is compelled to view them all. No matter how difficult they are to watch. Each film is different. Each family is different. Each method of murder is different and horrible. He begins to investigate the films to find out for himself if the murders are real. And if so, how did they end up in his house? As he inspects the footage, he becomes aware of a dark figure and a symbol present in the films at each of the murders. Could these murders all be connected? Through his research, Ellison connects the symbol in the films with a Babylonian deity named Bughuul, who is believed to eat the souls of children. Bughuul crosses over into our world when people see his image, and it becomes apparent that in each of these films, this demon selects a child in each family to control. The other family members are killed as a sacrifice to him before the child is consumed.
As Ellison realizes what’s happening, he begins to see Bughuul. Not just in the films but in flashes in real life too. As he begins to realize the danger he’s put himself and his family in; he decides no amount of fame and money is worth their lives. He attempts to destroy the films and disconnect himself from these cursed objects, but it’s no use. They’re connected to him now, and he can’t be sure that leaving the films, the house, and that town behind will be enough to save his family from the demon.
Clear character motivation. It’s something we find far too little of in horror movies and film in general. In Sinister, Ellison is a fully realized character. We know what he wants. We know what drives him to do the things he does. So, there aren’t a lot of holes in the story for the audience to fill in. All the characters that writer/director Scott Derrickson introduces in the story matter, even if it’s to a small degree. And each person Ellison encounters in the course of the story moves the plot forward. Looking through Derrickson’s filmography, there are many notable entries, Doctor Strange (2016), The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), and The Black Phone (2021), but Sinister stands out as a truly solid horror movie.
While Sinister fits neatly into the modern grouping of supernatural horror films, which usually consists of stories about possessions and/or hauntings, it stands apart from what we normally find there. Far too often, we find movies that depend too much on jump scares as a means to cover up a lack of anything truly scary. Or it snaps the audience out of their stupor brought on by a string of scenes within a movie that doesn’t add up to a narrative that makes any sense. While there are a couple of jump scares in Sinister, they aren’t used as a crutch.
I also have to give a bit of credit to this movie for its use of the children in the story. Hollywood has a bad habit of doing something I call “vilifying the children.” It’s when throughout the course of the story, the only purpose children serve is to cause trouble or ruin plans for the other characters/adults. It happens all the time, to the point that it’s cliché. I hate it, and luckily, Derrickson went a different way. He did something clever by making kids the murderers but not the bad guys. The kids are victims as much as the parents are. Even more, Ellison’s kids actually serve a purpose in the story above making their parents miserable. And that’s nice to see for a change.
I can’t write a full review of this movie without mentioning the films within the film. The home movies revealed as Ethan Hawke watches them are best described as… disturbing. I became aware of Sinister by listening to one of Kevin Smith’s podcast interviews with Scott Derrickson. It was their discussion about which film segment impacted them the most that got my attention. Their back and forth about the use of the home movies piqued my interest. But when they both agreed that the lawn mower scene was the most disturbing and I heard their mutual reaction to that memory, I knew I had to find out what they were talking about. They didn’t spoil it for the listeners because the movie had not yet been released. But sitting in the theater, watching it, I was anxiously waiting for that moment. All the films had their notable creep factor. And they really set a dark tone for the movie as a whole. But when I saw the lawn mower scene, I realized they were right. That one kind of sticks with you.