Sinister (2012)

First off, I feel the reception here was largely reductive. Cohesive, original, and guttingly scary, Sinister is outstanding horror. The found footage is great but this film is a distance runner. (Points are lost, yes, with the gloomy dead kids, though not much.) Grade A.

The super 8 films are some of the more disturbing things you'll see in horror films - even today. But when they switch off, there is no realism in the characters, no logic, and hardly any sympathy possible for Hawke's character. Also a few potential scares were missed.

It is what you expect out of a modern horror movie,bit o' mystery, bit o' scary, and in the first half I thought it played its hand very well, but it lost anywhere from a couple to a lot of points when it started getting very unsubtle about what was going on. Cashs in badly.

A let down. Most critics I read praised this as the scariest movie in years. Jump scares abound with no real sense of dread, and the ending plays out exactly as you expect about halfway through the movie.

The found footage angle was really well done and genuinely creepy, but the rest of the movie was a mess. I was (mentally) yelling at Ethan Hawke's stupid character the entire way through. Given the interesting premise, I was more than a little disappointed.

Good movie overall. I didn't like how dark some scenes were (even though they were filmed during the day). There were a few scares but it wasn't a "sitting on the edge of your seat" movie. It was kind of predictable as well.