Seeing countless horror films that are so close to being considered as "replica" to one and the other, I ought to be enthusiastic to see one that is practically an amalgamation of about fifty horror films. Which I was and which Sinister is. Being a mash-up of unjustifiable horror clichés, you kind of know how things will go and what frightening stuff will come get you, in the end, you're scared off your pants nonetheless. A funny thing happened while I was on the theaters, which held me, and like seven other people. Anyway, this girl, who is like three rows behind me, squirmed like mad to her best friend as if synchronized with my fidgeting feet. You can't really blame her, there's only eight people in the theater and that must've spooked her out, and a little with me, too. That's some kind of testament that Sinister has legitimate scares in its entirety, because the girl was practically frozen from the first frame to the last.
It's not entirely the case for me, though, because in events that the film is expected to mitigate, it goes downhill; the climax withers the movie at some minor extent. In the beginning though, the pic perfectly escalates genuine fright that maims my heartbeat for some reason, keeping it to pound irregularly. This is thanks to director Scott Derrickson - practically a director of conventional horrors, his most notable work, The Exorcism of Emily Rose badly-received due to its banality - whose atmospherics are admittedly creeping under the skin, and shots that are quite grand. The iconic steadycam is nowhere to be found, but it's easy to take note its inspiration with Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. If some filmmaker wants to be an auteur, take a lesson or two from Derrickson. His Jack Torrance in Sinister is played by Ethan Hawke (Daybreakers), a true-crime novelist named Ellison Oswalt, whose desperation to write a new bestseller lands him and his family in a small Pennsylvania home wherein a girl mystically disappeared leaving her family hung by a tree, all dead.
The film is - Hallelujah - motioned by a set of well-orchestrated characters that though shone with only a bit of light, manages to build sort of connections with Oswalt and make themselves matter. His wife Tracy (Juliet Rylance), an inch-too tired of their constant moving from different places; their twelve-year old son Trevor (Michael Hall D'Addario) curious to his father's works by day, freakishly sleepwalking by night; and daughter Ashley (Clare Foley), some kid with some real talent in painting who just wants to be home with dad and mum and Trevor. Turns out, the police have some kind of dismay with Oswalt too. This is when a naturally inhospitable town sheriff (Fred Dalton Thompson) welcomes them more bitter - he [Oswalt] kind of taunted policemen in his recent works.
But, as convention goes, bummed policemen will be the last thing he wants to be worried about, now that he's got his hands on a box of film reels, each displaying grisly and brutal murders of five families. Killed with an unexplained pattern by some supernatural boogeyman simply named as "Mr. Boogie". Soon enough, he founds him and his family in that pattern, too - there enters the midnight haunting and torturing of this entity, using the familiar horror stuff. Sudden dying of lights, foggy backyards, mindless decision-making - both the characters and the filmmakers - and too much jump scares than what are necessary. For whatever reason, fright crept under my skin, although these facts are to my knowledge.
In the end, it isn't a stretch to realize that Sinister doesn't let conventions exacerbate the movie out of it; it toys with what it has, and how vital the rear-end would be when it did - one word - satisfying. A-
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