Horror · Thriller · Mystery
Sinister
American
2012 · Directed by Scott Derrickson · 110 min
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Horror · Thriller · Mystery
American
2012 · Directed by Scott Derrickson · 110 min
Meaning, unpacked
Central idea
Sinister can be read as a film about the cost of seeing. Ellison wants the story to make him famous, and the film asks what happens to a person who treats other people's suffering as material, and who cannot stop watching.
Its lasting influence
It strengthened the Blumhouse model of small-budget, atmosphere-first horror, and its image of a menacing figure glimpsed in the corner of old footage became a recurring idea in later supernatural horror. A sequel followed in 2015.
The rest, in short
Every choice Ellison makes comes from his need for a hit. Then the film makes you complicit. You sit with him in a dim room, the projector's whir the only music, and each new reel invites you to look again. Looking is research, and it is also temptation.
The home, a place of safety, slowly loses its reassurance, and once evil has been recorded and watched, it cannot be undone. The last reel and the final shot turn the device on Ellison, and on you.
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Create your free spaceWhat happens
Ellison's family moves away, but he finds one more reel and sees the pattern: in every case the missing child is the killer. Ashley drugs her family, kills them on camera, then joins the other children in the box of films.
The last image
Ashley's murders become the newest reel in the collection, and she takes her place among the children in the footage.
What it says
Ellison treated other people's deaths as material, and the images he kept watching used his own family as the next subject. Burning the films and leaving the house changes nothing, because evil here travels through recordings, and being seen is how it spreads.
Or follow an idea from this film
See what influenced it
The Ring (2002)
The cursed-footage story that sparked Sinister. Compare how each film makes the viewer feel guilty for looking.
Coming soon
Compare another approach
The Shining (1980)
A writer in a haunted house, but with a very different, more stylised approach to dread. A useful measure of what Sinister borrows and changes.
Follow the idea
Peeping Tom (1960)
An earlier, more startling take on the idea that watching and filming can be a form of violence.
Jump forward
Hereditary (2018)
A later family horror film in the same slow-burn tradition, with a bleaker and more emotional centre.
Compare another approach
The Conjuring (2013)
Released a year later, it takes a more traditional, crowd-pleasing route to the haunted-house story, and shows what different directors do with similar material.
