30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 5: SINISTER (2012)

Sinister is the scariest movie I've seen since the first Paranormal Activity.  It's the kind of movie that leaves you walking out of the theater shaking.  It's well-made and taut, and nervewrackingly tense all the way through, but I think what truly elevates it is that the ghosts are real.  Not real in the "Based on a true story" sense (which I can say with pride that this film is not), but in the sense that the movie believes in them, and the characters eventually do.  Unlike many of its type, there's no Scooby-Doo ending to turn everything on its head and make the whole thing not worth it.  It's a truly scary movie that doesn't condescend to its material.

It opens with a startling image that sets the tone for the entire movie.  Then we meet Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), a popular true crime writer who's chasing one last big story, and moves his family into a town where a brutal murder took place: a family was found dead, and one daughter has gone missing.  The local sheriff (Fred Dalton Thompson, well-cast) doesn't welcome his snooping.  What's more, Ellison doesn't tell his wife (Juliet Rylance) or children (Clare Foley and Michael Hall D'Addario) that they've just moved closer to the crime than they think.  While exploring the attic, Ellison finds a box full of old 8mm films, labeled "Home Movies," which gives him a new point of view on the murder he's investigating, and much more.

It isn't difficult to see that writer-director Scott Derrickson is doing a wicked play on the now-tried-and-true found footage formula.  But he does one better on the genre by using the found footage to punctuate the film rather than leaning on it too heavily.  The clips feature some of the most brutal sequences I've seen in any horror film, and Derrickson is sure to avoid fetishizing the violence in, say, a Human Centipede style.  The film doesn't enjoy the brutality.  As Ellison watches the films, he becomes infected by them; his moral disgust increasingly conflicts with his need to write a new book.  He finds a supernatural element in the films.  Strange things begin to happen in his house and to his children.  By the time his conscience comes around, it may be too late.  The movie reaches a terrifying conclusion that is not so much predictable as it is inevitable; it has been looming for the entire film, and in the end it confirms what we have feared all along.

Derrickson's films have always had a conservative bent, and this film is not without it.  His The Exorcism of Emily Rose was a dull, moronic advocation for intelligent design.  His Day the Earth Stood Still remake was a well-intentioned but hamfisted cautionary tale about stewardship of the earth.  In Sinister, which I love as much as I hated Emily Rose, there is a bit of a warning about the culture of voyeurism and the perils of profiting from someone else's misfortune.

Hawke plays Ellison as a desperate but decent man.  This character could have easily been played as the kind of jerk who would intentionally endanger his family to get a book deal.  But Hawke finds the right note; Ellison is merely trying to support his family by doing what he knows how to do, though the promise of fame and fortune isn't far from his thoughts.  He's the perfect horror movie protagonist: a good man who is naturally corruptible.  Though he makes some questionable decisions, we always know why he does what he does.  Because his situation is believable, the scenes of family drama lend humanity to the terror.  I've grown sick of horror movies that bore us with their characters' marriage troubles, but here the family sub-plot gives us a reason to care about the horrors that are waiting.  There's also a nice performance from James Ransone as a none-too-bright but pure-hearted deputy who's a big fan of Ellison's work, and unwittingly signs on as his sidekick.

The film captures just the right atmosphere.  Derrickson never overplays his hand, keeping in mind that there are more scares to be mined from telegraphing terror than in simply showing it.  He and cinematographer Chris Noll envelop Ellison in darkness; note the frequent setting of his home office, which he keeps closed off from his family and the outside world, so that it seems like night even when it's day.  Much of the reason the film works so well lies in Christopher Young's discordant score, which always reminds us that something--we may not be sure what--is not right.  The introduction of a Boogeyman, which might have seemed silly in a less classy film, actually works here, because of what the filmmakers show us and don't show us.

Sinister is a masterwork of fright.  It's fine-tuned to twist every nerve possible.  It's from one of the producers of Paranormal Activity, and deserves to stand alongside that film as a modern classic of the genre.  You may not want to see it alone.

**** out of ****