‘I couldn’t finish the movie’

By Emily Prestwood

Online Editor

 

I do not watch scary movies. I do not like scary movies. I do not recommend any horror film.

Scott Derrickson must have had people such as me in mind when he directed the movie Sinister.

I talked myself into watching the movie because I assumed it would be a mere cliché combination of suspenseful music, dark corners and freaky figures in white clothing. I was wrong.

While the movie does contain such cliché elements, it also has a morbid characteristic. The viewer constantly is shown disturbing images of homicides portrayed as being acted out by children.

As if the thought of children killing was not enough, Ellison Oswalt, played by Ethan Hawke, finds an unsettling common denominator in each mass murder: Mr. Boogie. The sight of Mr. Boogie was too much for me to handle.

Sinister is an undeniably scary movie, with performances adding enough human interest to give depth to the basic building blocks of horror,” the late movie critic Roger Ebert, a movie critic, wrote. “All through Sinister, you keep thinking, ‘Switch on the lights, fool!'”

I could not agree more. The darkness rooted in the theme of this film left me shaking in my boots. I couldn’t finish the movie.

The images of pure brutality landed a knot in the bottom of my stomach and shot goose bumps up my spine. Needless to say, I quickly lost my appetite for the popcorn I had been eating and blared Christian music all the way home that night.

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