Lee McKinstry
Editor-in-chief
“Sinister” is the year’s best horror film. Or, to be more precise, it’s the best horror film within a horror film. See, the real star of the sleeper hit is not Ethan Hawke (or the enormous cable-knit cardigan he wears in literally every scene — did he just get an L.L. Bean contract?); it’s a box of Super 8 film canisters, tucked away in a box marked “Home Movies. Recorded on their reels are some of the most grotesquely inventive and disturbing images I’ve ever seen.
The box and its contents are the film’s centerpiece. Ellison Oswalt (Hawke), a true-crime writer desperate for another hit, finds them. They were in the attic of the suburban home he’s just moved into with his family, the home which just happens to be the subject of his latest book. A family was found hanged from a tree in the backyard the year before, and their youngest child is still missing. Somehow, it seems, the police missed this remaining piece of evidence.
Ellison, who’s bleeding cash after two failed books, can’t believe his luck. He shouldn’t. Silent and spinning out in warm grainy film, the murders of five different families are recorded on the videos. Innocently labeled “Family Hanging Out ’11” (the murdered family in the backyard) or “BBQ ’79” (a family burned alive in their car), the reels are truly terrifying in their casual depiction of violence. The camera holder zooms in at one point on a flower, and then moves to a duct-taped woman bound by the family pool. This disturbing contortion of common mementos (for who doesn’t have a collection of home movies in their house?) is what will leave “Sinister” crawling under your skin for days, more so even than the questions about what person — or thing — is committing these crimes.
Many directors have tried and failed to make the “found footage” horror concept work. Beyond the films that rely entirely on wobbly hand-held cameras and their nauseating effects, there are the number that take the more “meta” approach. Protagonist finds unsettling videos, protagonist watches unsettling videos, protagonist immediately regrets watching said videos. Probably the most successful use of this plot device was in “The Ring” (2003).
What elevates “Sinister” from the pack is the sense of intimacy these tapes create with the victim. By watching them, we are sickened, and somehow, director Scott Derickson suggests, complicit. Just like the macabre-fascinated Ellison, we’ve come to the theater to be entertained by misery. In response, “Sinister” muddies what we think of as innocent entertainment, like family barbecues or swimming in the pool. This subversive betrayal is disturbing and the mark of a smart and challenging horror movie.
Producer Jason Blum helped create similar images of horrific novelty in 2010’s “Insidious,” an incredibly underrated movie that I can’t believe came out of a major studio. But “Sinister” is better. That’s partly because it sustains a more even tone throughout, but also because it never lets the viewer stray too far into the supernatural. The real horrors, it implies, are in those things we’ve become most comfortable with — in the lives we’ve crafted for ourselves, in the people we’ve become. Following Ellison’s descent into obsession with the murders, even when there are blatant signs that he should get out of the house, we see a man possessed with the idea that one discovery might fix everything that’s gone wrong, restoring the normalcy that’s been corrupted.
In the end, it might be too late – for Ellison and for us all.