Not Sinister, but creepy

Rating: 6/10 (23 February 2013)

Good American horror is hard to come by these days, especially if you grew up on horror as I have and know all the tricks of the trade. I don't get scared by movies anymore, but I did enjoy the first two Paranormal Activity films the first time through which is what lead me to check out both Insidious (average film from the writer and director of Paranormal Activity) and Sinister (from a producer of both Paranormal Activity and Insidious).
So is Sinister a good Horror film? No, it's not a particularly good horror film, but it's worth a watch if you watch it for what it truly is, a mystery with horror elements. The direction of this film often relies heavily on the same old jump scares that only work on someone young or new to the genre. Hearing the same old ominous horror music played during what are supposed to be tense moments, followed by a gotcha surprise can be tedious (try ominous silence over music, has any modern horror director ever seen Hitchcock's The Birds?), but Ethan Hawke's performance and the mystery he is trying to unravel kept my attention and did in fact make me uneasy at times.
Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) is a True Crime writer who hasn't had a successful book in 10 years. Apparently his last two books were received so poorly that they put his entire career and legacy in jeopardy which has driven him to both drink and obsess over writing another best seller. He learns of a family which was murdered in their home in a small town in middle America, the young girl went missing, and the killer/abductor was never found. He makes the controversial decision to move himself and his entire family into this home so he can investigate the crime and write his novel. This decision to move into a murder house where the killer was never caught is where the movie loses a lot of people. Why would anyone put their whole family in jeopardy by moving into a house with the slightest chance the killer might return to the scene of the crime? The script attempts to highlight Oswalt's desperation to write another successful book, and frequently reminds us of his drinking problem, but for the most part he seems like a rational guy and the decision to move his family into this murder house is understandably too much for many people to swallow.
I personally just accepted the premise and suspended my disbelief. However, I expected Sinister to be smarter than it was. After moving into the new home, Ellison Oswalt soon finds 8 mm footage of smut films showing the murders of the family which lived at the very house he moved into, as well as murders of other families at other homes. After being initially horrified with what he found, he soon felt a morbid excitement over his discovery and fascinated over using it all in his next book; instead of investigating one crime, he could link it to multiple crimes as the work of a serial killer. His investigation of this disturbing smut footage is where the movie gets interesting, and quite creepy, but once strange things start happening in the house it started to lose me.
At first it seemed like Sinister was going to tease me over exactly what was going on: Is there a serial killer stalking him and his family? Is it a supernatural entity haunting his family? Is he losing his mind Jack Nicholson style in The Shining? I was hoping all three of these possibilities would be presented as equal possibilities to keep me wondering throughout, but it was pretty clear what the threat truly was early on in the movie. I still enjoyed the mystery we had, I just thought it could have went deeper and been more ambiguous about what the threat was, if there even was one. Has the killer returned to retrieve his film? Is it a ghost? Is Oswalt just a crazy drunk? I wanted Sinister to keep me guessing throughout.
I say it's worth a watch if you can suspend your disbelief that an author, no matter how desperate, would put his wife and two kids in the slightest bit of danger to write his next work. Had I seen this in the theaters I wouldn't have been disappointed, but I definitely think it could have been better.