Sinister (2012)
Directed by Scott Derrickson
True-crime writer Ellison Oswalt is in a slump; he hasn't had a best seller in more than 10 years and is becoming increasingly desperate for a hit. So, when he discovers the existence of a snuff film showing the deaths of a family, he vows to solve the mystery. He moves his own family into the victims' home and gets to work. However, when old film footage and other clues hint at the presence of a supernatural force, Ellison learns that living in the house may be fatal.
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There are a number of reminders of Kubrick's The Shining here, none of them resonant.
Then again, I don't recall anything occurring after we got cable and HBO (back when it only aired after 5 pm and on the weekends) and thus were able to watch uncut horror movies such as "The Exorcist" and "The Shining."
Oswald starts an obsessive investigation (a nod to "The Shining") that yields a disturbing links to larger pattern of family murder and a potential connection to an occult spirit that preys upon families.
They borrow liberally from earlier horror efforts, with The Shining being the most obvious influence.
The script by C. Robert Cargill and director Scott Derrickson is indebted to some welcome influences, including Stephen King ("The Shining," "Secret Window," many other "anguished author" stories) and Michelangelo Antonioni (1966's "Blowup," in which a fashion photographer stumbles upon a murder mystery in a series of images).
Ellison Oswalt, a celebrity author of true-crime novels played by Ethan Hawke at his most antsy and compelling, is a knockoff of Jack Torrance in The Shining: a writer struggling to produce, who likes his whiskey too much, whose work lures him toward mental instability, and who moves his wife and kids into a home where gruesome murders took place.
His young son crawls out of a box screeching, looking not unlike Linda Blair doing the spider-walk thing in that cut scene from The Exorcist.
I was strongly reminded of Ellen Burstyn creeping into her attic in " The Exorcist ," holding only a candle.
Then again, I don't recall anything occurring after we got cable and HBO (back when it only aired after 5 pm and on the weekends) and thus were able to watch uncut horror movies such as "The Exorcist" and "The Shining."
William Friedkin's The Exorcist casts a long, dark shadow on all who seek to replicate that film's sense of dread.
Is he challenging anyone to defeat him like Pazuzu did to Lankaster Merrin in “The Exorcist”?
Like “The Shining,” “Misery,” “The Exorcist” and “Jaws” played on people’s mental fears without fancy effects as patchwork for weak material, the modern-day “Sinister” captures the most scary element of “The Ring” and “The Cabin in the Woods”: voyeurism.
At the same time, he keeps freeze-framing the footage, combing it for a clue to the killer's identity, just like the hero of Blow-Up.
This is creepy enough, but there’s something more that he notices and that causes him to go all David Hemmings in Blow-Up (1966) — a barely glimpsed face lurking in the background, on the edges, or in reflections.
Even with its jump scares and standard supernatural tropes, Derrickson taps a vein with Sinister that feels both adult and strange, a tone of utter doom missing from recent similar films like Insidious.
“Sinister” – from producer Jason Blum (“Insidious” and all four “Paranormal Activity” films) – is the first film in 2012 to remind us.
The film has quite a bit in common with James Wan’s superior Insidious from a couple of years ago, but while Wan had by then become a hardcore classicist – all magisterial camera moves and orchestral stings – Derrickson prefers jittery industrial montages and an elaborate, beautiful sound design that makes it difficult to tell the diagetic from the non-.
In these ways, like John Carpenter and Dario Argento before him, he proves what a legitimate craftsman he is, his instinctual filmmaking and knowledge of the genre every bit as apparent as that of James Wan (2011's " Insidious ") and Ti West (2009's " The House of the Devil ").
The only nice touch this movie is sly enough to make sport of is the “why don’t they just leave” business, in a twist that owes a lot to The Ring (2002) and even more to last year’s Insidious.
Recent offerings like Paranormal Activity and Insidious have found several ways to make haunted houses seem fresh and novel again, and now the producers of those films are back with yet another low-budget, high-concept example of how, in the horror biz, sometimes the oldest ideas are the coolest ones.
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Derrickson borrows the vibe of Joel Schumacher's 8MM as Hawke, swigging whiskey and giving the crease between his eyebrows a workout, struggles with the horrible things he's seeing.
These are nasty but challenging themes that David Cronenberg (" Videodrome ") or Kiyoshi Kurosawa ("Pulse") have metastasized into smart, visceral terror.
“Sinister” – from producer Jason Blum (“Insidious” and all four “Paranormal Activity” films) – is the first film in 2012 to remind us.
Nevertheless, like the 2007 indie horror film Paranormal Activity (which originally gained traction through festival screenings and word of mouth), Sinister‘s rich premise and creepy monster, Mr. Boogie, could easily spawn a string of high-profit franchise sequels.
Recent offerings like Paranormal Activity and Insidious have found several ways to make haunted houses seem fresh and novel again, and now the producers of those films are back with yet another low-budget, high-concept example of how, in the horror biz, sometimes the oldest ideas are the coolest ones.
It’s a great way to maximize the budget, but unlike, say, the Paranormal Activity movies, it never feels that way, because you feel the story existing further beyond those parameters.
Sinister simply shows too much, overlooking the main instructive of the Paranormal Activity franchise: a well played lump moving under the sheets can dissolve your spine.
But Sinister does little with the footage besides grind it into a bland hybrid of The Ring and Paranormal Activity, though Sinister relies more on "gotcha" moments than storytelling.
With a local Deputy (JAMES RANSONE) doing some investigating work for him on those, Ellison attempts to piece everything together in hopes that his resultant work might rival the success of "In Cold Blood."
He tells his wife (Juliet Rylance) that he’s stumbled onto his In Cold Blood.
With Ellison's decision to keep the videos from the authorities, despite multiple bumps in the night as a consequence of his film-viewing, Derrickson attempts to capture a flimsy Capote -esque quandary of a writer putting himself and others in danger in order to claim fame (at one point, Ellison even exclaims that the story he's following could be his In Cold Blood).
“This could be my In Cold Blood,” he says.
After watching the first two (including the one depicting the hanging of the family he’s writing about), he starts to call the police, but then changes his mind, perhaps because he realizes that these films could mark his true breakthrough, providing the kind of sensational material that will assure his next project legendary status—his In Cold Blood, as he puts it.
Believing he's stumbled across his own In Cold Blood, he stays up nights scrutinizing the films and looking for connections between killings whose locations and victims are still unknown.
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It all looks a lot like the home movies the hero of Michael Mann's Manhunter uses to track down a serial killer ?
You can tell that Derrickson or Cargill or someone behind the scenes here loves Michael Mann's Manhunter, the first Hannibal Lecter film, that tracked brutal murders captured in plain "home movies" which a cop deciphers for clues.
It's not as intellectual as "The Innocents" or "The Others," as poetic as "Pan's Labyrinth" or "The Orphanage," as full-out grisly as "Manhunter" or "Seven."
As Naomi Watts did with the American remake of The Ring, Hawkes classes up the genre (and looks a lot more comfortable in these horror surroundings than say Daniel Craig did in the awful Dream House or Ryan Reynolds trying to pull off a credible killer in the remake of The Amityville Horror).
The buzz is a puzzler, particularly since Sinister's hero makes agonizingly dumb decisions and the movie draws so heavily from The Ring, the 2002 chiller about a demon that possesses anyone who sees it on videotape.
In "Sinister," the heinous depravity of the past is rustled awake and lives on, the power of its recorded imagery so potent that it's bound to finally break free (in this way, come to think of it, the film would make a fitting companion piece to 2002's " The Ring ").
And Gore Verbinski’s psychologically taut “The Ring” mastered sound and real-life imagery to ultimately make us afraid of a simple phone call or a television’s white noise.
The only nice touch this movie is sly enough to make sport of is the “why don’t they just leave” business, in a twist that owes a lot to The Ring (2002) and even more to last year’s Insidious.