For the record, it's English. I was born in Tilbury, Essex, made temporarily 
American citizen?"
There’s something creepy about watching old 8mm home movies and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because there was never a sound track. All you ever hear is the perpetual, metallic whir of an old projector while grainy family images of early days play out on a sheet hung from the ceiling. It’s like watching a dream or a memory of an earlier time presented in grainy Kodak color. Whatever it is, writer/director Scott Derrickson must have the same reaction. By opening his film Sinister with horrifying images of an aged, silent, 8mm home movie, Derrickson has tapped in to something surprisingly scary, and it’s an unsettling feeling that sticks with you until the end of the film.
Ethan Hawke plays Ellison, a writer who now specializes in true crime events. “No one enjoys my fiction,” he states, which is why he has turned his talents into a form of investigative journalism, but his wife and two children are not happy.
After moving into a vacant house in rural
While rummaging around the attic, Ellison finds a box of home movies which he threads into a projector. What he sees is a horrifying sequence of events that both appalls and mesmerizes the writer. He’s disgusted but he can’t turn away. After all, what he’s found is the subject of his new book; it’s an 8mm recording of the murder of the family who once occupied the house. In essence, it’s the house version of a supernatural snuff movie.
The film is darkly lit throughout. The exterior shots tend to be cloudy and all interior shots appear to rely mostly on light streaming from a window into the room. This relentlessly dark locale adds to the heaviness of the film’s overall setting, and take my word for it, Sinister is one unrelentingly bleak horror film.
There are times when the film cheats with the scares when it doesn’t need to. Considering that what we’re already witnessing is horrifying enough, those odd ‘boo’ moments, sudden bursts of sound made only to make you jump, feel like unnecessary add-ons. Plus, the throbbing noises masquerading as music are so prominent it’s often difficult to determine what noises Ethan Hawke’s character can hear for real as he creeps around the halls of the house or what is meant to be an atmospheric soundtrack.
“I wouldn’t sleep one night in this house,” a local deputy tells Hawke’s character, and he’s right, neither would you or I knowing what we know about the place, but this is a horror film where the motivations of its lead character surpass the common sense of real life, and Ethan Hawke’s Ellison can’t help but remain in the scariest house in Pennsylvania until he gets to the bottom of everything, even if it costs him his marriage, and possibly his life.
The film scares, no doubt about it, and if your yardstick to measuring whether a horror film works by how effectively it frightens you, then Sinister succeeds, but there’s a point halfway through the film where you have to ask the question: Is being this continuously, mercilessly tense really entertainment?
