I am really torn about Sinister. On the one hand, it is an incredibly scary film. I recognize it for how good it really is. But on the other hand, I'm not sure people should watch it. This is one of those horror films that transcends its lesser cousins and stands head and shoulders above the rest to occupy rarified air saved for films like Psycho, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en. Dictionary.com defines horror as "...an overwhelming and painful feeling caused by something frightfully shocking, terrifying, or revolting; a shuddering fear...a strong aversion; abhorrence." The movie is rated R for shocking images. This is not false or sensationalized advertising. The definition and rating fits the film perfectly. I caution you before you go see it. There are images in this film you can't unsee. But if genuine terror is what you're looking for, this movie has it in spades,
The film starts with a Super 8 short showing four people being hanged on a tree in grainy, slow-motion. We find out later that this was a family being murdered. An egotistical true-crime writer (played quite convincingly by Ethan Hawke) wants to write his latest book on this murder. He moves himself and his family into the very house where it actually happened with the hanging tree in the backyard. As he begins writing, he starts hearing strange noises in the empty attic. as he investigates the noises, he finds a box filled with Super 8 movies and a projector to watch them. The box contains five murders of different families occurring over time from the late 1960s to the present. We find later that they are all linked to a mysterious figure that appears in each one. I won't go into great detail describing them, suffice they are horrible and a bit sadistic. As the movie continues, the writer, Ellison, is becoming more and more unglued when he realizes he may have set loose an ancient evil spirit. The movie ends on a decidedly unhappy denouement.
So, I have seen many, many horror films in my day, ranging from comedies (Cabin In The Woods, The Reanimator, Scream, Nightmare on Elm Street) to drama/thrillers (The Hitcher, Cape Fear, Night Of The Hunter), to slashers (Halloween, The Evil Dead, Hostel, Saw), to psychological horror (Repulsion, Henry-Portrait Of A Serial Killer, Alone In The Dark, Kalifornia), to supernatural/monster horror (Dracula, The Exorcist, The Omen, Alien). Most of them are not worth the celluloid they are printed on. They tend to go for cheap laughs and shocks, what I call a "Boo!" movie, where something jumps out and says boo! I have seen so many of these, that most of them barely register a blip except when they make you jump. But occasionally, once in a blue moon, I see a film that genuinely makes me uncomfortable, one that makes me feel I really should not be watching it. One that fills me with a sense of real dread, where the atmosphere of the film is suffocating and genuinely terrifying. Sinister falls into this last category. When I get suffused by that dread, I know I have seen something of substance, of quality. It elicited a real reaction from me, a fairly rare occurrence when watching these types of films, and the feeling is one I don't like. The problem is, when I see these great films, they usually are the signal of a large crop of lesser pretenders that try to capitalize on the same themes. But since we have already seen it before, these imitators must set the bar even higher to out-excess what was already excessive. Thus, Psycho begets Deranged and Last House On The Left; Halloween begets Friday the Thirteenth and Nightmare On Elm Street; Halloween begets Saw and Hostel. Not to sound like an old fuddy duddy, but I'm not so sure that is exactly healthy for a society. We have already surpassed the bounds of simple terror. Our grandparents shrank from Frankenstein's monster. Our parents ran from the theater with Psycho. Our older brothers and sisters cringed to The Exorcist, and so on and so on. Where does it end? I don't think this is an unfair question.
Now, some of you are reading this and saying, "Come on, Tom. Lighten up. It's only a movie." To that I say, yes, it is only a movie. But the medium of film is our storytelling mechanism, like the epic poem in Ancient Greece to the plays of Shakespeare to the novels of the Reformation onward. And the rules of acceptable themes keep changing, the line keeps getting redrawn. And while that may be the inevitable byproduct of progress, we have to ask ourselves just what are we doing? Is this really worth going down the path we are going? I'm not trying to make a judgement for or against this movie or any other. As I stated before, it is much smarter than your average horror flick. Everyone is drawn well, fully-developed. The characters are likable, believable and sympathetic, even the ones who don't seem so in the beginning. No one is a caricature or over-the-top and act in rational ways. This makes the ending even more shocking and sad. This is the horror film I like, one that does not rely on cheap laughs or thrills, but rather depends on sustaining dread, an impending sense of nihilism. These films are, ultimately, much harder to make, and that is why we consider classics like The Sixth Sense great and The Human Centipede unmitigated crap. Sinister is dark, both literally and figuratively, with most of the scares happening at night, and the movie does not end happily. While this is the type of horror I like because it stays with me long after I see it on the screen, it is also the type I dread, for exactly the same reason.
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