Sin-ful

I recently watched last year's horror film Sinister. It stars Ethan Hawke as an obsessive true crime writer who moves his family into a house where the grisly murders he's now writing about took place. In the attic, he discovers a series of super 8 movies that chronicle not only the very murders he's investigating, but a series of similar crimes dating back decades. Most unsettling of all is the ghostly image of a horrific creature he finds embedded in each of these films.

Sinister does indulge in a few tired tropes of the horror movie genre, but there is no denying the movie is effective overall. A number of elements in the film just work exceptionally well. First is the casting of Ethan Hawke as the central character. He is a very natural and relatable actor, and he manages to make the compulsion of his character here understandable. In a lesser actor's hands, it would be too easy to shout at the screen, "stop watching these damn movies!", but you completely buy the premise here.

Secondly, the execution of these super 8 films within the movie is absolutely perfect. Each film is more horrific than the last, and well thought out from top to bottom. They unfold with a true, methodical sense of creeping dread. They rely very little on cheap scares. Each detail is perfectly executed, right down to the playfully horrid name written on each film canister, a nod to the terrible way in which a whole family is killed off on celluloid.

Third, there's an excellent soundtrack. Composer Christopher Young creates a truly unsettling score that in all the crucial moments (the super 8 films themselves) sounds more like a creepy soundscape than actual music. If you blasted this stuff at your house on Halloween night, no trick-or-treaters would dare knock on your door.

But oddly enough, the movie possibly fails at reaching the top of the horror pile because of its supernatural component. The phantom monster in each of these films is a well done, ghastly looking creature. But what you see in these movies is plenty horrific before you add the notion that an ancient Pagan deity might be behind it. The movie is just as much about the obsessive psychology of the main character as it is about the mystery of the murders themselves, and I can't help but feel that somehow the supernatural trappings of the latter undermine the effectiveness of the former.

Nevertheless, this is a watch late at night in the dark kind of film that will then have you jumping a bit at strange noises for a while after. It's not top shelf, but it far exceeds the quality of most horror movies. I give it a B.