Good evening my beloved. Tonight we discuss one of the most frightening films I’ve seen in a good long time. Seriously, I saw Sinister on Saturday evening and it’s still messing with me when I go to bed each night. In the sea of pop culture crap that tries to pass as “horror,” this is the real thing.
The film begins with vintage Super 8 footage of a bound and hooded family tied to nooses in their back yard. Someone out of sight cuts a large branch free. As it falls, the weight pulls them up. We watch as they kick and struggle. And we watch them finally stop. The next scene shows true crime novelist Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) and his family moving in to the house where the crime occurred.
In the attic, Ellison finds a box containing a projector and films depicting this and several other murders. The disturbed writer attempts to solve the crimes as it becomes increasingly apparent that the killer is still around and may have targeted Ellison and his family for one of his snuff films.
I’m not going to give more of the plot away than this. This is really all you need to know. The rest of it is the story, which is why you want to see the movie anyway. I’m not a spoiler factory like some.
So, why is is so scary?
First, other than a few horror movie cliches, (why doesn’t anyone ever turn on a light?!) the scares are pretty legitimate. There aren’t many cats jumping from dark corners. When the jump scares hit you, you don’t feel relieved, you actually feel more scared because more is revealed. (Or you realize that this is about the time you should get someone like the police involved, but that he’s not going to and things are not going to go well…)
Second, the nature of the murders is extremely violent and cruel to the point of being difficult to watch. As a viewer you realize that whoever is committing these heinous acts is so nonchalant about it that he or she has casually set up or was carrying the camera; making sure to get good close-up shots of the frightened faces and death throes of the victims.
Third, and this is probably the worst for me, is that everything is so common. This is no haunted Victorian mansion on a stormy night. This is a normal tract-house in a normal neighborhood that could be anywhere in America. There is nothing remarkable about any of it, from the setting to the bickering protagonists and their kids to the whitebread middle-America normal people that are the victims.
This could easily be my house and the tree in my back yard could easily be a hangin’ tree. I’ve investigated strange noises in the small hours and Spawn of Scarydad has treated me to a few rude awakenings in the middle of the night as she hit my bedroom door (which she did, twice, the night I saw this movie). Being a dad and owning a home means I’ve experienced things that were not really scary before, but are now that I’ve seen Sinister.
This is a very scary movie. I highly recommend it, but approach with caution because it will stick with you long afterward. Or, for a more concise warning, if it scared the Scarydad, it will probably scare you too.
Scarydad review: ***** Five out of Five stars.
A not on reviews: We are not critics or students of film. We are not Snootydad. If a film is scary it gets points. Good things (acting, set design, etc.) add points. If a film is flawed but still scary, the scary points will always win. Not that this film has problems, just sayin’.
