Chances are, if you know me or if you're a frequent visitor, you know I love my ghost stories. I can do zombies, vampires, werewolves and just about anything else just fine... throw a ghost at me, though, and it's gonna be a sleepless night. Sinister gave me more than one sleepless night.
The house Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) moves his family into isn't the kind of house you'd expect anything to happen in. It's not old, or big, or derelict. I's just a normal house, in a normal neighbourhood, which makes it that much more interesting. There's nowhere less likely to harbour a dark past, but it does. That's a great start to the film.
It's pretty clear straight away that the local police don't like Oswalt. Can you blame them? What kind of person moves a young family into the house where a brutal murder took place? Especially if the reason for the move was to capitalize on the town's pain. Can't say I'd be very fond of his being there, either.
Oswalt is an author living on former glory. He's under pressure to put out something bigger than the last and you can tell it's not going well. The problem comes from Oswalt's inability to get his priorities straight. For him, the pressure to find success as an author outweighs doing the right thing. It outweighs being a good husband and father. More than that, though, we have to consider the fact that he keeps going back to those damned tapes, even after seeing what they contain. What does that say about his personality? Nothing good.
You can tell things aren't perfect between Oswalt and his wife, Tracy (Juliet Rylance). Personally, I didn't find his wife particularly supportive, which makes it easy for outside force to drive wedge between them.
Good husband? Iffy. Good father? Well, aside from moving his children into a house potentially damaging to their long-term mental health, I was impressed with the way Oswalt encourages his daughter's creativity - which also happens to work as a tool to increase the creepy factor. No matter how scary a movie is, it can always be made scarier by throwing in some creepy ass kids's paintings.
With Oswalt, it's like he's entirely separate from his family. They're sleeping while he's chasing ghosts. They're dealing with the fallout of his decision to move there but he's so wrapped up in his own shit he doesn't seem to care. At the end of the movie, when you think you finally got that happy ending, you believe he's finally learned about putting his family first - but has he? Or, has he just gotten frightened enough to run and take them with him?
That being said, I love the ending's false hope. I love that the one cop (James Ransone) who agrees to help him - and, incidentally, is the star of the second Sinister film - works it out but is too late to do anything to help. And I'm not going to even mention how badly I screamed when that final jump got me. (Well, screamed, jumped, cried, and beat the crap out of Jay because he'd seen it and didn't warn me.)
We've spent a lot of time talking about the tools and tropes horror movies use and you'll spot one of the big ones in Sinister. Oswalt's son is a sleepwalker. One of the best frights in Sinister comes as a result of that sleepwalking. When Oswalt opens a large box, you're expecting it to be one of the ghostly children but it's just his son, Michael Hall D'Addario's Trevor. It's not any less frightening, though, because of the look on Trevor's face.
I thought showing those kids a lot was a brave decision. I usually prefer not to see the baddie too much in a horror movie; it's scarier. The kids are creepy, that's for sure. I think their appearance would have been more horrifying, though, if they'd be a little less substantial. They look so solid. If they'd been a little... wispy? they'd have been more convincing.
The score for Sinister is an interesting one. There's a beat, but it's not music. As Jay says, "It's like an underlying growl." That beat sets the ace for the film. It intensifies as the action pucks up and, when the film reaches its horrific climax, the "growl" becomes positively grating. It's a sound that stays with you, long after the film has ended.
You're going to find plenty of ghost stories on this list as we make our way toward Halloween. What'll it be tomorrow? Come back to find out.
