Sinister

Sinister has a better premise than almost anything else from the 2010s mainstream, and it is the only one of its wave that still frightens people on a rewatch.

The premise is a box of home movies. Each reel is labelled with a cheerful domestic title — Pool Party '66, BBQ '79, Sleepy Time '98 — and each shows a family being killed, filmed by one of their own children. The reels are the film, and Derrickson's single best decision is to let them play almost uninterrupted on a projector with no score, just sprocket noise and the hum of a fan, while Ethan Hawke sits in the dark and watches. There is nothing edited into those sequences to tell you how to feel. They are just footage, and they are extremely hard to sit through.

The second-best decision is Christopher Young's score, which is less music than a set of sounds — processed voices, metal, a lurching industrial clatter that arrives when the reels do. It is the most effective horror score of its decade and a large part of why the film works on people who are otherwise immune.

It is a film about a man who will not stop looking

Ellison Oswalt is a genuinely unpleasant protagonist, and the film is clear-eyed about it: a writer whose career peaked a decade ago, who has moved his wife and two children into a crime scene without telling them, and who keeps watching because a bestseller is worth more to him than their safety. Hawke plays him as vain rather than brave. Every bad thing that happens is downstream of his ambition.

Where it loosens

The mythology arrives via a convenient professor on a webcam, which is the laziest scene in the film. There are two or three jump scares that cheat — a face in the frame accompanied by a bang — and the film does not need them, given what the reels are doing for free. And the final act's logic is clean but delivered in a rush.

For the same found-footage-inside-a-film trick done with more restraint, Lake Mungo; for the same curse mechanics with better rules, It Follows.

The short answer: Ellison burns the films and moves the family back to their old house, believing he has escaped. That is the mistake. The curse requires a family to move into a murder house and then leave it — moving out is the trigger. His daughter Ashley, already taken by Bughuul, drugs the family, axe-murders all four of them while filming it, paints the walls in their blood, and is led into a photograph by Bughuul to join the other children.

Who or what is Bughuul?

A Babylonian deity, introduced in the film as Bagul or "Mr Boogie", who consumes the souls of children. He works through images: he can only reach into the world through a recording or a depiction of himself, which is why the Super 8 reels matter and why the film treats a photograph as dangerous. In each case across decades, he has induced one child of a family to murder the rest, film it, and then taken that child.

Why does moving house kill them?

This is the rule the film saves until the end and it is a good one. The pattern across every case is identical: a family moves into the house where the previous family died, lives there, then moves away — and the murders happen at the new address. The house is where Bughuul gets his hook into a child; the move is what completes the cycle. Ellison's decision to flee is therefore the single thing that dooms them, and he makes it believing he is protecting them.

Why did Ashley do it?

Because she had already been taken. The film seeds it carefully: she is the one painting on the walls, she is the one who talks about the children in the house, and she is the one who has been in the attic. By the time the family packs, the daughter leaving with them is not entirely their daughter.

Is Bughuul in the photographs?

Yes, and the film makes you find him. He is present in the background of the reels and in family photographs, usually badly lit and at the edge of frame, and Derrickson refuses to zoom or point. The final image is Ashley being led by the hand into one — which is also how the previous children appear in it.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Threat 018 is the signature and it is near the floor. Only 14 works in the index score lower, which makes this about as purely supernatural as horror gets. There is no human antagonist — the children are instruments and Bughuul is not negotiable.

Pace 058 puts it on the shock side, with 77 works slower. It is not a dread film. The reels function as set pieces and arrive on a schedule.

Viscera 040 is just below the median film — 45 works score lower. The reels contain some of the most upsetting images in the index, and almost none of them are gory. The lawnmower reel is the exception.

Tone 012 is genuinely bleak — 22 works score lower. Every single family in the film dies, including the protagonist's, and the cycle continues.

Era bias 078 is modern craft, with 70 works lower — but note that the film's most effective material is a digital reconstruction of degraded Super 8, which is doing the opposite of what the score suggests.

On jump scares: many, and several are cheap. The film is on a lot of "scariest ever" lists — including the Science of Scare study, which measured viewers' heart rates — and some of that is the stings rather than the craft.