Some interesting horror ideas tossed around without any purpose

Rating: 6/10 (25 May 2016)

Throughout the entire movie, I was waiting for something interesting to happen and it never did. Watching this reminded me why I decided to watch more Asian horror films these days. They're way better in terms of building an atmosphere. I particularly have a disdain for horror movies that uses situations where the characters are predictably gonna get involved in bad situations. Although this movie wasn't a huge offender for this since the crux of the film is actually quite interesting, I wish they executed the inner conflict of Ethan Hawke's character better. He makes a lot of dumb decisions throughout (aka Plot Induced Stupidity) but I will praise once again on the neat idea of a guy dedicating his life to expressing horrific stories actually getting involved in one himself. The movie follows all your typical horror clichés such as the classic "home invasion at night" style of environment and some cheap jump-scares (the ending one was pretty lame) and fake jump-scares. At least the supernatural aspects of this picture weren't that distracting for me. I have no idea who on earth was the costume/makeup designer for this movie because they did a really abysmal job and made the movie a lot less creepy when the actual horror scenes came. I didn't even care THAT much about the ending either even when it was quite refreshing since it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. Also I felt like all this bizarre religious occult reference symbolisms near the end felt incredibly tacked on to the movie. Kind of sad since it ultimately ended up relying on it as the foundation of the whole movie.
Overall, I found the movie to be a bit disappointing and everything that featured within Sinister was done without a sense of purpose; just a bunch of ideas being thrown in just for the sake of it (my biggest problem with this "horror" movie). Even worse that the all the ingredients to make a good horror: Atmosphere (obviously), a coherent story and scares (duh) were nearly non-existent when being meshed together.
Oh did I forget to mention the film isn't even that scary? A few attempted jump scares ain't going to cut it for me. Actually, I'm more impressed with horror movies if they don't use it in the first place which the movie did in some parts. But it wasn't enough.