After a brief sojourn into sci-fi with the drippy remake of The Day The Earth Stool Still, director Scott Derrickson returned to the world of horror with Sinister, a stripped back and moody frightener that took him back to his roots of The Exorcism Of Emily Rose and – er… Hellraiser: Inferno.
Teaming with unstoppable horror factory, Blumhouse, Derrickson aimed to give us an uncompromising experience in fear that not only introduced us to the suit wearing, mouthless, demon known as Bughuul, but actually has been proved to be one of the scientifically scariest movies ever made due to the amounts of beats per minute it forces your blood thumper to rev up to.
But is Sinister really that scary? I mean Derrickson is a talented horror filmmaker in is own right who recently hit a brand new high note with The Black Phone, but can such a thing as scientifically proving the scariest movie ever made actually be an accurate indication on whether a film is an good or not?
Ellison Oswalt is a true crime writer who’s still trying to replicate the success of his first novel by moving his family to the town of Chatford, Pennsylvania in order to pen an account of the murder of the Stevenson family who were all killed by hanging except the youngest daughter, Stephanie who disappeared without a trace. Such is Ellison’s desperation, he has neglected to tell his already displaced wife Tracy and his two children – 12 year old Trevor and 7 year old Ashley – that the house they’re now living in is the actual house where the Stevenson’s met their horrible end.
A quick search of the attic turns up a box full of reels of Super 8 film all labelled as seemingly innocuous home movies, but upon watching them, Elliot is horrified to find that they all contain gainy footage of the murders of various families that seem to date back as far as 1966. Not only are they each filmed by a mysterious voyeur, but each mass murder has an instance of one of the children going missing after being suspiciously absent from the grotesque tableaus and as Ellison delves deeper into the unsettling rabbit hole, he finds more clues that refuse to make sense.
Who is the strange figure that the writer spots on the periphery of each film, seemingly presiding over each murder, and is it the same figure seen in a bunch of childish doodles of the crimes that has been ominously labelled “Mr. Boogie”?
As the pieces start to fit together, the horrible truth soon starts to take shape that these deaths have been orchestrated by a single entity, but who is this sinister Mr. Boogie and what has actually become of the missing children. If Ellison isn’t careful, he’ll soon find out the hard way.
Whether you find Sinister to actually be the scariest movie ever made is entirely a matter of conjecture as scares tend to be almost as subjective as laughs when it comes to cinema. However, what isn’t up for debate is that Derrickson’s no nonsense chiller is an incredibly tense 110 minutes that mercifully chokes you into submission with an opressive carpet bombing of perfectly timed scares and a layer of claustrophobic dread. However, to fully dive into what caused Sinister to really get under my skin means that I’m going to have to get a little spoilerific in order to get to my point. However, before we do, a massive tip of the supernatural hat has to go to Derrickson for turning a lean, mean, nerve jangling machine. The main way he manages to achieve this is by bouncing between an ominous slow burn as Ethan Hawke’s obsessive writer tries to get to the bottom of things in a desperate attempt to reignite his flagging career, but then switching almost into Blair Witch territory as we watching the genuinely haunting home made murder movies with an ever mounting mixture of fascination and dread.
It’s the home movies that ultimately steal the show (more on them in a minute), but Derrickson also makes sure that the other stuff is suitably malevolent too as Hawke’s heavily flawed hero – his first of two on the trot for Blumhouse along with The Purge – starts making profoundly disturbing connections. A scene where he creeps through the house wielding a baseball bat while the ghosts of the missing children gamble around him in slow motion certainly gets those aforementioned BPMs rising and a moment where Ellison’s son, caught in the throes of horrific night terrors, suddenly arches screaming out of a box is a cracker. However, it’s those home movies that really hit home as there’s a real, malicious feeling that we really shouldn’t be watching the scenes unfold in front of us. Dreamlike and yet simultaneously profoundly real, the cream of the crop is a sequence featuring a lawnmower that may in fact be one of the most accomplished jumps scares of the decade.
Helping all this work is Hawke, who brings an everyman feel to his role despite being named Ellison Oswalt and even though he’s actually somewhat of a shitty human being because of what he’s putting his family though in order to get back on top, the actor makes his desperation realistic and relatable and even has him reacting in a way far smarter than the average white family does in this kind of movie, actually having him leave the “haunted” house when shit gets too real.
However, it’s all for naught once we get to Sinister’s magnificently cruel ending and here’s where that spoiler watching I mentioned earlier comes fully into effect. As we head into the finale, Derrickson deftly avoids a typical final act chase, seemingly having the Oswalt family leave the house before anything awful can happen, but the film proves to be one step ahead of us much in the way the soul sucking, nattily dressed Bughuul is agrad of Ellison. The writer and his family isn’t the group that finally exposes the child corrupting demon like so many other horror films – no, their just another family who ultimately fall before the creature without ever truly being able to put up a fight. In essence, Sinister is a film about the victims the monster claimed before the “main” family turn up and ultimately put the kibosh on the supernatural, you just don’t realise it until it’s way too late to be even remotely prepared. Essentially a movie about the kids Freddy Krueger killed in their dreams prior to A Nightmare On Elm Street, or the people claimed by Sadako’s haunted videotape before the first Ringu occured, Sinister is a fantastic, American answer to the kind of chills you usually find in J-Horror where the slow burn dread is only a flashy distraction to a horrible ending being the only possible outcome.
The scariest movie ever made? Highly debatable (I wouldn’t say it has a particularly high rewatch value), but this incredibly well crafted creeper is certainly sinister enough to deserve a mention.
🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 