On the surface, Scott Derrickson’s 2012 film Sinister could be simply defined as just another folk horror film. However, the way in which Derrickson incorporates voyeuristic 8mm movies and composer Christopher Young’s score allows the film to hold up more than a decade later.
Ethan Hawke stars as Ellison Oswald, a true crime author whose days on the best-seller book tour circuit are behind him. Though in typical tortured artist fashion, Ellison convinces his devoted wife and children that his latest project will be his next big hit.
Because when has that ever gone according to plan?
Naturally, Ellison’s plan goes sideways when he discovers a box of 8mm movies documenting a slew of grizzly family murders. It becomes quickly apparent that there’s more to his latest investigation than he bargained for, as supernatural presence puts his family in danger.
To this day, I consider the first half of Sinister a horror masterclass in taut tension that smartly utilizes analog home movies and composer Christopher Young’s score to eternally unnerve audiences.
Sure, retro film looks inherently spooky, but it has less to do with the degraded aesethic of 8mm and more to do with the way Derrickson chroeographs these homicidal home movies that has seared them into my brain. It would be one thing if these handful of segments were quick death reels that shocked in their heinous means of execution, but if that were all there was to them, they would seldomly stick with me as they have.
Instead, it is the build-up to the executions that make them so memorable, as Derrickson forces the viewer to inhabit these voyeuristic home movies for an uncomfortable period of time. The killer watching the family going about their idyllic day at the lake or creeping throughout their home as they sleep puts us in the moments before the killing.
The calculated nature of the killer makes for a sobering depiction of true crime, as the audience inhabits the worst moments of another’s life. Watching as a predator stalks its prey ultimately makes for a stomach-churning cocktail of suspense and dread building that sell the already quality kills.
These scenes’ construction allows Sinister to also have one of the most shocking jump scares of the decade. Smartly placed within the chronology of the audience watching several of these home movies, Derrickson deploys it just as the home movies begin to lose their ick factor.
For all of Sinister’s analog terrors, the one element I find seldomly praised with as much regard is its fantastic score. Composer Christopher Young did a remarkable job complimenting each fright with his tribalistic score, which does a great deal of the legwork to make the scares land as well as they do.
Young’s score is primarily responsible for conveying how the film’s antagonist, Bughuul, a pagan deity who feeds on children, is essentially a virus that infects families. He isn’t just a monster wandering the halls of someone’s home, but an entity that seeps into the souls of his most vulnerable victims, and uses them to carry out his will.
The score that accompanies the character has a tribal cultish element to it, and takes the place of more overt supernatural cliches (though the second half of the film has its fair share of cliches). Faint whispers and uniform hand drumming never allow the audience to forget that just because something overtly scary isn’t on screen, Bughuul’s presence and influence are always there, lingering in the ether. The score feels akin to a ritual being recorded and the subjects on screen are cursed.
Even if I largely find the second half of Sinister to lose much of its bite, the film remains a unique blend of folk horror and commentary on the way society consumes true crime media. I find it ironic that I’m writing a Sinister retrospective within weeks of a new serial killer dramatization killing it on the streaming charts. While the film’s scares may falter the longer it goes on, Sinister is successful as an allegory for the exploitative nature of true crime media and the public’s ravenous consumption of it. Derrickson’s tapping into the scuzzy side of true crime and voyeurism is what gives Sinister its defining trait that seperates it from other genre films in a big way.
And though Sinister’s “scariest film of all time” accolade may be up for debate, Sinister certainly has plenty of scares that have appreciated nicely in the decade since the film’s release.
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