Relies on jump scares like I rely on coffee but still pretty good. The home video stuff was chilling and Sinister definitely is eerie to watch but I think it falls victim to itself a little bit. There's a repetitive nature of Ethan Hawke (who was great) watching something, fiddling with tapes, writing some stuff down then having family drama and it was all quite effective but didn't really seem to go anywhere. To complete the murder mystery we have to watch all of the tapes and because of this they are sprawled throughout the film with not much going on around it.

I found the family stuff engaging because Ellison is a bit of an asshole and was being selfish about all of it. And look how that turned out... all in all the scares are good and even though the creepy kid angle didn't really work because of the kids not being that creepy I still thought the boogeyman stuff was scary. There's something about images and video and noticing stuff in them you didn't before that feels so oppressive. Like we are constantly missing horrible stuff that is right in front of us.

If there's one thing that deserves massive credit it's the use of light and shadows. Perfectly lit.