Day 17: Sinister - A Supernatural Cult Classic.
Seventeen days of October have already flown by, which is honestly wild—where is the time going? With our 31 Days of Fear past the halfway mark, I had to include one of the few horror movies that still gives me nightmares to this day. Sinister, directed by Scott Derrickson, is a 2012 supernatural horror film about a struggling true-crime writer who moves into a new house with his family, hoping to reignite his fading career.
His first book was a hit that led to an actual arrest, but everything since has flopped. Desperate to make another success, he ends up putting his entire family in danger. It’s hard not to shake your head at how far ego can drive a man, but then again, without that ego, we wouldn’t have gotten one of the scariest horror movies ever made. Let’s dive in.
Ellison Oswalt, played by Ethan Hawke, is a man desperate to reclaim the success he once had. Married to Tracy (Juliet Rylance) and father to two kids, Ashley (Clare Foley) and Trevor (Michael Hall D’Addario), he decides to move his family into a house where a horrific tragedy recently occurred. His plan? To uncover what really happened and use it as inspiration for his next big book. Now, the reason I call Ellison selfish is simple, he keeps all of this from his wife and lies to her just to make the move seem normal. Not exactly husband-of-the-year material.
I get the whole idea of wanting to chase your dreams and do your best, I really do. But risking the safety of your family to do it? That’s where I draw the line. And the dangers Ellison faces aren’t your average “crazy fan shows up at your door” type either—they’re straight-up supernatural. Maybe he didn’t believe in ghosts or evil spirits at first, but after everything he saw, you’d think he’d start rethinking his life choices.
The new house turns out to be the site of a horrific murder where the previous family, the Stevensons, were hanged in their backyard. As if that isn’t terrifying enough, their ten-year-old kid mysteriously vanished afterward, which becomes the hook that really drives Ellison forward. He tries to play it off like it’s all about his passion for solving terrible crimes, but his wife makes it clear—his real legacy isn’t his books anymore, it’s his kids, whether he likes it or not.
Elliot discovers a box of old home movies that turn out to be snuff films, each showing a different family being murdered in gruesome ways—some are drowned in a pool, others burned alive in a car, their throats slit in their sleep, or hanged like the Stevenson family I mentioned earlier. Any reasonable person would call the police immediately, but not Elliot. He sees this as his big break, convinced he’s stumbled onto evidence of a serial killer that could make his next book a massive success.
Classic selfish Elliot. Instead of doing the smart thing, he keeps the tapes hidden and starts analyzing them himself, which is when we’re introduced to the film’s terrifying antagonist, Bughuul, a pagan Babylonian deity known as the eater of children.
Eventually his wife catches on and confronts him, and rightfully so, but he plays the victim and tries to justify his decisions as a necessary one. I must say that his wife is a great one. Through it all, she stays loyal, compassionate, and understanding even when she doesn’t agree. I’m not sure if I could be so strong nah, especially if the spiritual realm is involved.
As the story begins to wrap up, Elliot’s decisions start to haunt him, not figuratively, but literally, as the spirits of the children and even Bughuul start to reveal themselves to him. Everything eventually starts getting to him and he decides now is the time to move back to their original house but it’s too late now. It’s revealed that this final decision is what leads to the downfall of the family. The missing kids weren’t kidnapped by a serial killer but rather under the influence of Bughuul himself.