Sinister is a decent ghost/demon horror movie. The writer/director Scott Derrickson is a horror movie maker who’s been quite busy in the genre for the passed decade or so. Sinister stars Ethan Hawke as Ellison Oswalt, a true-crime novelist. It’s been awhile since his last hit novel and he moves his family into a home that’s had a rather gruesome murder in it to help him write about what happened there. He finds a box of 8mm film in the attic which gives him huge leads on the crimes he wants to write about. It also awakens a demon that pulls Ellison and his family into the darkness of a decades long killing path, If Ellison can make it through, he has the novel of a lifetime in his hands.

Very easy on the gore front, Sinister goes more for the creepy scares. Lot’s of shadows, things that go bump in the night type of stuff. The movie is well put together and has some good ideas in it, but it’s a bit long in the tooth. It slowly builds up until the last 10 minutes or so where everything comes together. An angle with Elllison’s son is started near the beginning and then completely dropped in favor of focusing solely on Ellison. In fact after that, the son is basically forgotten for the rest of the movie. There’s some great tension build up throughout, but the “monster” of the movie looks like a professional wrestler more than a demon so his visual impact undermines his impressive stalking capabilities

I thought the end was pretty creative, but it’s an easy movie to forget when one or two of these types of demon/possession movies  come out every single year. It’s a packed field with Insidious, Mama, The Conjuring, Paranormal Activity and all of their sequels. It gets hard to remember which ones I’ve seen and which one is new.  ‘Tis the season for this kind of movie, but I found Sinister to be a middle of the road affair.