Sinister - tedious horror

Here is a 'horror' film that really doesn't deserve much in the way of attention.  But I watched it last Friday and so I'm going to tell you about it regardless.  At least this way I can pile giant quantities of meh on top of it until everyone forgets it exists.  Sinister is a film about how a crime writer decides to move his house into a house where people were killed in order to get inside the mind of a mass murderer who was never caught and hopefully write the perfect crime novel.  If you've guessed that it'll turn out that he goes mad a la The Shining and tries to kill his family then you'd be wrong.  Something much duller happens instead.

If anyone can tell me what the title of the film actually refers to then please do.  I can only assume it's referring to the style of the film or how people in the film see the actions of our protagonist Elliot (played by Ethan Hawke).  Elliot moves into this new house with his family and immediately discovers a bunch of super-8 film in the attic, super-8 film that includes horrible footage of people being murdered.  How does he find this footage?  Did he know it was there already (cos he finds it very fast)?  Why has he got a super-8 projector lying around?  Why he doesn't call the police immediately?  All extremely good questions.  When a mysterious face starts to appear in the footage (a face that sometimes moves in still images) and odd things start happening around him why doesn't Elliot burn all the footage and get the hell out of there right now?  Because he's trying to write a really good crime novel apparently.  So that means he doesn't give two shits if the whole community hates him, his wife is estranged from him, his son is having increasingly more disturbing fits and his daughter is painting crazy images of death on the walls.  It's all about the novel.

That's right folks, Sinister hails from the 'that would never happen' school of horror.  Not 'that would never happen' in the sense that there is no Baghoul who goes around harvesting children from inside paintings / super-8 film; I mean 'that would never happen' in the sense that people would never act the way Elliot does.  If even half of the crazy shit that happens to him in this film happened to literally anyone in the world, then that person would scream murder and run for the hills.  But Elliot just carries stumbling around in the dark narrowly avoiding ghosts looking for inspiration for his novel.  Nutter.

Now this wouldn't be too bad - after all this sort of stuff happens all the time in the horror genre - but for the use of cheap scare tactics in Sinister offending me.  Yup, I was actually offended that the makers of this movie thought they could get away with throwing a couple of cheap tricks in my face (literally at one point) and thinking it passes as horror.  People going boo! is not horror.  I was actually moderately pleased with the film's denouement as I didn't see it coming until just before it happened, but even that was made crappy by the film chucking one more boo! moment at the screen just before the end credits.  Sinister isn't bad, it's just barely worth the effort to write this review let along spend 100 minutes watching it.  Please don't bother.