Sinister (2012) announces its intentions in the first two minutes. Before a single word of dialogue, before the writer's moving boxes or the new house or the family who doesn't yet know where they've moved, there's a piece of Super 8 footage: a family of four, hoods over their heads, being hanged from a tree in their own backyard while the camera watches. It's real-looking, mundane in its horror, and it plays on a loop. Scott Derrickson made that sequence the thesis statement of the whole film, and the rest of Sinister spends its running time earning it.
What Sinister actually does well
Ethan Hawke plays Ellison Oswalt, a true-crime writer who hasn't had a hit book in a decade. He's moved his family into the house where those four murders happened without telling his wife (Juliet Rylance) or his kids. He finds the Super 8 box in the attic. He should stop watching. He doesn't stop watching. This is the engine of the film: a man who knows exactly how bad the footage is and keeps threading the next reel anyway, because he needs the story more than he needs the peace of mind.
Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill build the film around a genuinely clever structural choice. Each reel in the box documents a different family's murder, each spanning a different decade, each shot in a different domestic setting. "Lawn Work '86" and "Pool Party '66" and "Sleepy Time '98" are labelled like home movies. The contrast between those cheerful titles and what's actually on screen is where a lot of Sinister's dread lives. Christopher Young's score helps, threading atonal noise underneath the projector footage while silence sits beneath everything else. The difference in texture between the two sound worlds is deliberate and effective.
The film understands something that The Conjuring (2013) would also explore: that a haunted house works best when the supernatural threat has a specific, named shape. Here that shape is Bughuul, an ancient deity who consumes children's souls and travels through images. The concept is smart. An entity that exists inside photographs and film gives the story a built-in rule set, and it means every time Ellison watches the footage, he's doing exactly what Bughuul needs him to do.
Hawke carries more than he's given credit for
Ethan Hawke's performance is the film's quiet anchor. Ellison Oswalt isn't likeable. He's vain, he's careless with his family, and his professional vanity keeps overriding basic self-preservation. Hawke plays all of that without apology, and the result is a protagonist whose decisions feel genuinely motivated rather than genre-mandated. When he sits alone in the dark watching a family die on a projector screen, drinking whisky and taking notes, Hawke makes it both pathetic and completely understandable. That tension keeps Sinister from collapsing into pure monster machinery.
The supporting cast is thinner. Rylance does what she can with a wife who exists mostly to be lied to, and the local deputy (James Ransone) provides some levity that the film doesn't always need. Vincent D'Onofrio appears briefly as a folklorist via video call, delivering exposition with enough conviction that it doesn't stall the pacing. The occult professor character is a genre staple, but D'Onofrio makes it feel slightly less like a plot device than usual.
Where the scares land and where they don't
Sinister is at its best in the Super 8 sequences. The fourth or fifth reel Ellison watches is "Sleepy Time '98," in which a family is tucked into their beds and then suffocated with plastic wrap. It is one of the most disturbing sequences in 2010s mainstream horror, and it works precisely because it looks like a home movie. The camera is handheld and slightly overexposed. The horror is framed as footage someone was proud to make. That's what makes it stick.
The jump scares are less successful. Derrickson deploys them with too much regularity in the second half, and a few of the Bughuul appearances lean on a sudden loud sound where the image alone would have done more damage. The film earns its tension honestly in its first hour and then spends some of that goodwill on conventional horror mechanics. It's not a fatal problem, but it does mark where Sinister stops being a film about obsession and becomes a more familiar supernatural thriller.
The ending is genuinely nasty. It commits to its own logic without flinching, and it doesn't soften the consequence of Ellison's choices for the people around him. In that sense Sinister lands closer to Hereditary (2018) than to most of the studio horror around it at the time: the monster gets what it came for, and the family doesn't get a last-minute rescue. That willingness to follow its premise to its actual conclusion is what makes Sinister hold up a decade later.
The film's place in 2010s horror
Sinister arrived in a specific moment. The found-footage cycle that The Blair Witch Project (1999) ignited was still commercially dominant in 2012, and Derrickson found a way to absorb found footage's texture into a conventionally structured film. The Super 8 reels feel like found footage. The rest of the film doesn't. That hybrid approach gave Sinister a formal identity that most of its contemporaries lacked.
It also performed well enough to spawn a sequel, Sinister 2 (2015), which Derrickson didn't direct and which mostly confirms that the original's strengths were specific to his handling of the material. The mythology of Bughuul doesn't scale well to a larger canvas. What works in Sinister works because everything happens inside one house, around one projector, to one man who knows he should leave and can't.
Scott Derrickson made a haunted house film where the haunting is entirely earned by the protagonist's choices. That's harder than it sounds. Sinister (2012) isn't a perfect movie, but it's an unusually disciplined piece of mainstream horror: patient, specific, and grounded in a performance that treats the material seriously. The Super 8 reels still hold up. So does the ending.