The story follows Ellison, a true crime writer whose 15 minutes have came and gone. Looking to write another big best seller, Ellison moves his family to a home where a family was murdered and a child went missing. This crime has never been solved and Ellison believes he can turn the case into a fantastic new book. Things get freaky when he discovers a box of video footage in the attic, each of them revealing gruesome family murders with one thing in common - each of the tapes reveals some kind of cult image and the face of a strange masked man (who really looks like Abbath from the band Immortal). Ellison delves deeper and deeper into this mystery, and soon befriends a police officer who is able to confirm that each of the family murders depicted in the tapes appears to be linked. So who exactly is this creepy faced dude who keeps appearing in all of these hidden snuff films? I don't want to spoil more of the film for those who haven't seen, but I'll just say that the ending was extremely predictable and disappointing. If you want to read spoilers, keep going. If not, skip the next paragraph.
I really think that Sinister had the potential to be a really good, psychological horror. I was sort of hoping that it would be Ellison himself who would have gone mad and killed his family, kind of like Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining. What we get instead is the extremely predictable ending where all of the missing children from the murder cases wind up being the killers under the demon Bagoul's influence. I'm getting a little tired of these creepy little kid movies, especially when it becomes so painfully obvious which direction a film is going within the first 20 minutes. I guess by ending the film the way they did, it leaves the film open so that we can have Sinister 2,3, and 4 for next years Halloween, depending how this one performs. I was also surprised by the lack of jump scares in the movie, most of the better ones were revealed in the trailer.
The first half of the film did a great job of setting up a creepy, unnerving atmosphere. The opening shots with the hanging family were well done and had me immersed in the films story. It's unfortunate that the film fell so flat in the second half. The actual demon himself was not even the scariest part of the movie. Even with a good setting, the film was littered with genre cliches that really had me losing interest quickly. I feel like this film could have been so much more. Nevertheless, it was not a "bad" film by any means and probably will wind up being one of the better horror films of the year. I think the biggest problem with this film was that we all went in with expectations that were too high. Somewhere deep inside, I was hoping that this film would genuinely frighten me and keep me up a night or two thinking. Go in expecting an average popcorn flick, and you won't be as disappointed as I was. In the meantime, I'll keep waiting and hoping that the next new horror will get under my skin a bit better than this one did.
3 OUT OF 5 STARS
*** out of *****