Not as Sinister as it could have been...

Rating: 6/10 (30 December 2013)

...but not bad either. This movie has a lot of things going for it but the negatives stop it from being a brilliant horror.
The premise is that a true crime novelist and his family move to a house where a family was murdered and one of the children disappeared. The novelist conveniently forgets to mention this fact to his wife. Although to be accurate the murders took place in the back yard so technically he is not lying. The novelist played by Ethan Hawke is trying to rekindle his literary success and is hoping that his latest book will bring him both fame and fortune. Soon after moving in he discovers a box with 8mm movies. Upon playing the movies he realizes he is looking at different families before and during their murders. He also realizes that there is a mysterious figure present in each movie and be believes that he is on the trail of a serial killer who has been killing families and kidnapping one child from each family from the mid-1960's. So far it sound like a psychological thriller....
....until the missing (ghost) children start appearing all over the house, the projector starts switching on by itself,weird noises and footsteps are heard and some genuinely creepy stuff starts happening.
The good aspects of the movie are: the acting is great and Hawke is especially good in his role. You don't know whether to sympathize with his character who is the family man or despise the fact that he is so indecisive and self centered because of his career. The effects are well made and there are some unexpected scares in the movie. There are more predictable ones but they can also be entertaining. The music score is also very well done and effective. The 8mm footage is genuinely unpleasant to watch and very effectively scary in the movie. Even though you know what the footage is about to reveal after you see the first clip it is still very scary stuff. However...
The bad aspects are: there are too many predictable scenes and scares and the whole movie tends to be predictable if you are paying enough attention. Within the first 30 minutes I was sure I knew who the killer was and I was pretty sure about how the movie would end. Throughout the movie it is eluded to that the family is not doing well financially and yet when they move back into their old house near the end of the movie it looks like a mansion. For someone not doing well in the money department they sure can afford to live well, buy a house to do research in and hire movers twice. That might explain why they are broke...
The author keeps on claiming that everything he does Is for his family and not the money or success but when he is presented with evidence of multiple murders he takes no action to report it to the police or at least talk to them. He hoards the footage for the purpose of writing his book. Not exactly the action of someone who exclaimed he would rather cut off his hands then see injustice done. The same can be said of the sheriffs deputy who does some research into the murders for the writer but doesn't see it as necessary to take actual police action.
Another problem is that even though he is spooked almost from the start the writer is in denial most of the time and hardly ever switches on the light when entering a dark room...even when he starts seeing ghosts and inexplicable sinister things. You would think that that would be the first thing he would do....but no, he persists in exploring the house in near darkness using a flashlight and starts drinking more. So the scares soon lose their validity since every time it is dark you expect something creepy to happen. Furthermore, even when he sees a photo of himself falling through the floor of the attic as he is being pulled by ghost hands his immediate action is to pull his laptop screen down and ignore it...not to run away to safety with his family. So there are definite inconsistencies and things which make no sense.
Overall however this movie even with its flaws is not bad. There are definite scares and even though it's predictable at times it is still very watchable. So I would give it a 6-6.5 but it could have been better.