Sinister Movie Review (2012)

When a true crime writer moves his family into a house where a family was murdered so he can write his next book, it doesn't take long before evil makes itself known. While moving boxes into the attic, Ellison (Ethan Hawke) finds a box of Super 8 films. He watches one of them which starts off innocently enough but ultimately shows the family who previously lived there being hung from a tree in the backyard by an unseen force. Ellison watches another tape and it shows a family bound and chained in their car before being set on fire. It's not until he watches the third film of a family who's tied to lawn chairs and pulled into the pool to drown that he sees a mysterious and creepy figure. Upon further inspection, he notices the figure is in every video. Ellison also notes that there's a young child from each family who is missing and not included amongst the dead in each video.

Noticing symbols from the crime scenes that he can't place, Ellison is put in touch with a professor from the local university who deals with the occult and is told that the symbol is for pagan deity who eats the souls of children. Things reach a boiling point at the house and Ellison burns the films and decides it's best for the family to leave the murder house. Unfortunately, this did absolutely nothing as when the family moved back into their unsold home, the box with the films was there. After finding missing clips of the previously viewed films, Ellison watches it only to discover that the missing kids were the ones who killed their families. After viewing the new tapes, Ellison falls to the ground as his coffee was poisoned by his daughter. She ties him and the rest of the family up and chops them to pieces with an axe. The deity then picks her up and transports into a film playing on the wall to join all of the other missing children.

~TJ