"Sinister" is a masterful study of dread.

Rating: 9/10 (5 January 2014)

Don't be fooled by comments from random viewers who say this movie isn't scary. It works its way into your head and, aided by Ethan Hawke's intense and convincing performance, it will follow you into your nightmares. It's not surprising in fact that the screenwriter based the story on a nightmare he had after watching "The Ring," itself one of the most disturbing horror films ever made. The central conceit of "Sinister"--that physical images, whether drawn, painted, photographed, or filmed, can have a life of their own--is ripe material for our media-saturated society. The idea that merely seeing an image will cause the viewer to be possessed by it is the stuff from which every child's nightmares is born. Hawke's character is obsessed by the horrifying images he sees on the 8mm films, but like us, he cannot look away from them. Like the girl who climbs out of the well and into your living room in "The Ring," "Sinister" insists on the power of the photographed or filmed image to come to life in the mind of the observer; because we are watching along with Hawke, we are "infected," as is he. "What has been seen cannot be unseen," as the wise saying goes; images live on in the memory, at the very least. And one of the film's most brilliant features is the masterful score, which at times brings to mind the repetitive industrial clacking of machines in motion--relentless and unstoppable--whether it be the sound of typewriter keys, the rotation of reels in a projector, or the maddening rhythmic thrumming of your beating heart on a sleepless night.