The Five Scariest Movies of All Time (According to Fi) #5: Sinister

For this year’s countdown on this greatest of all months, I figured it’s about time for me to weigh in on that particularly contentious horror geek topic, the scariest movies of all time.
 
You’ll notice this is not a “Fi’s Five Favorites” list. That’s because these are not my five favorite horror movies, nor my five favorite cross-genre movies with some kind of scare factor to them. These are the five movies that have given me the flat-out most intense case of the jeebies, which, oddly enough, isn’t even close to being the same list.

Of course, that distinction changes nothing about the credit these movies deserve for their insane jeebies-inducing-ness.

First up, Sinister.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s how it goes:

Ellison is a down-on-his-luck true crime writer looking for his next hit.

He moves with his family to a house where the previous family was mysteriously murdered, to research and write about the crime, and discovers a box of film strips in the attic, showing a set of similar murders of whole families, which he begins to piece together as a chain reaction orchestrated by an ancient demon called Bughuul, with his own family now next in line.

Why it’s terrifying:

On paper, this is a pretty basic evil house story, so it takes doing a lot of things extremely right to put it on this list. First, the obvious personal stuff.

Screenwriters never represent book writers accurately, and there are a few details that are a little off even in Sinister. For example, the size of the house this family can afford while wondering where their next paycheck is coming from, even accounting for the standard murder house discount. But then, movie makers pull that one on protagonists of every career.

The obsession that goes with writing, on the other hand, and the terrors of failure, of being selfish, of being a fraud, of not being understood, of being asked to choose between what and whom you love, those this movie gets spot-on, making Ellison’s fate extra scary in a very different way for me, for obvious reasons.

Okay, on to the non-writer creep factors, which are quite sufficient on their own.

Unlike most evil house, family-stalking-demon stories, Sinister isn’t about its jump scares.

Go away, Sinister 2, this post isn't about you.

The big moments are the murder films, which are not startling. They’re not about their supernatural elements. They’re not cartoonishly in-your-face bloody like the setpieces of most movies that revolve around their creative kills, nor are they cut-away-to-black restrained. They’re just plain thoroughly, straightforwardly disturbing.

Maybe it’s the silence of the films. No screams, no dialogue. Maybe it’s the stalker-shots at the beginnings of the films before they get to the murdering, taken from behind bushes. Maybe it’s the way the victims are sedated first, or the direct, un-gloating, unfeeling action of the offscreen killer.
 
The result is that with no overacting, underacting, imperfect visual effects, and no looking away from the scene itself in order to avoid these things, there’s about as little as there can be in the way of comforting reminders that this is a movie.

We get no more or less than exactly what low quality soundless recordings of things like four semi-conscious people tied to weighted deck chairs being drowned in a swimming pool would look like.
 
It’s a simple, perfectly effective communication of the horror of the subject, and just recounting it here is giving me the chills all over.

Okay, true horribleness aside, there’s one more extra special touch that puts Sinister over the top for me.

Evil house stories usually come tumbling down over the obvious question: Why not leave?

Before something like this happens.

Sinister plays with this in one very creepy, slightly spoiler-y way:
 
It’s moving out of the house that kills you.

Oh, the torment begins the moment the family moves into the evil house, and it’s a hundred percent effective in forcing them to run screaming from their massive suburban investment. And that’s when the obsolete shaky-cam stalker footage starts.
 
I love when any story can successfully spin a tired trope a new way, so this would feed my love of this movie without having to feed my fear of it, but it manages to do both by making the sense of doom that much stronger.

Knowing that characters probably won’t escape from an evil house but can at least spend a couple hours trying like hell can be scary.

Knowing they've already made an unrecoverable error but still have to pull the trigger to resolve the rest of the curse, that's doom. And for me at least, that's infinitely more terrifying.
 
Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!