Sinister is, ostensibly, an occult crime story. It is set in Pennsylvania, where I come from, though not in a real place in Pennsylvania; but I find it to be a taut, muscular, visceral fright fest. It requires no deep thinking or excavation. It is a scary, scary movie, perfect vintage Blumhouse at the height of its ethos and power: spend a very small amount of money and maximize every dollar's worth of scare.
I think it starts very strong with a deeply disturbing visual of four people slowly being garrotted by the neck in a tree. Children in horror films are usually objects of sympathy in which some kind of sinister supernatural force is preying upon them, like in The Exorcist or Poltergeist. But sometimes they are the sinister force: Village of the Damned, The Children, There's Something Wrong With the Children, Children of the Corn. This is sort of a strange kind of hybrid of both of those things.
I also love a horror film involving sort of cursed media, like The Ring. Cursed media is often used as a kind of mechanism of supernatural transmission. In this film, I think it's also a metaphor for complicity. I don't know if in 2012, we were excoriating the 24-hour news cycle or the idea of voyeurism or voyeurism without end, engagement or engagement only for fame and profit.
This is a scary movie about something going wrong in a family. We've got this relationship of Ethan Hawke's character. Ellison Oswalt, who is riding this line between being a participant and being an observer in his own family as he's working through this kind of list of true crime books that he's writing. It's a story of diminishing returns in that direction. We learn right away that he's set up shop in a recent crime scene that he's going to be writing about. And we have all of the horror tropes that one might expect, like mysterious boxes of media that are showing up in the attic. He cracks the box, and what are all of these titles? We've got “Family barbecue,” we've got “Hanging around.” And as we're learning about the book that he's writing, we're learning about the relationship of the films that he's found to the stories that he's telling. We think we're tracking a serial killer or a kidnapper, but it turns out to be something so much more unusual than we were expecting.
From the very first night with family in this house, things are off to the races. We've got kids having night terrors. We've got devastatingly unsettling paintings on the walls of their bedrooms. And from the time that this movie came out, it's very much in the vein of sort of insidious, down to the title, Insidious and Sinister. But in this film, which is a family drama evolving in tandem with a supernatural horror story, soon enough, there is a Babylonian demon that's kind of introduced into the mix. And thanks to, I guess, the kind of transitive property of demonometry, we've got this supernatural cross-pollination that's happening to and infecting the family, infecting the viewer.
The mise-en-scene of Sinister is ostensibly as pitch black murky as the story that it's kind of attempting to sort of visually explore. It's got unholy storyboards drawn by children, all of which feature this Mr. Boogie character. It's got Chekhov's French press. It's got sort of a soupçon of paranormal propagation, this kind of evil outgassing and a spreading of supernatural infection in the way that The Amityville Horror does (the OG, that is, with James Brolin and Margot Kidder) in the sense that we watch evil work its way through the structure of a family.
And yeah, I think it's a really scary movie.
To listen to our episode on Sinister, click here.
Bradford Louryk