I love how scary, atmospheric and focused the movie Sinister is. The way the tape scenes are shot and the flawed father/ alcoholic writer character who knowingly puts his family at risk by staying in ‘the murder house’ is a very refreshing take on horror cliches. Everything is so taut and well paced. The best part is that they found a way to make something grounded (somewhat) in reality, to be really frightening. The first half is amazing and is probably what made it a bit of a cult classic. And then the ghost children start running around the house and we see the monster visually and everything falls apart.

What they need to do is remove that abrupt and tacked on tonal change from realistic investigative horror-thriller to unhinged supernatural drama. I think they were trying to appease both the ‘artsy’ audience who would like the first half and the casual movie goer who want heightened supernatural scares in the second half. But as soon as a movie can be split into two halves like this, in my opinion, it usually doesn’t become the sum of its parts.

What they could do is leave the first half largely unchanged (but maybe add some scenes to develop the main character’s psyche and previous failures as a set-up) and have the second half of the movie shown through our overworked and tired main character’s eyes, so that we never really know if all the unhinged things happening in the second half are the hallucinations of a struggling writer going mad or not. (I think they might be going for this a little already but it wasn’t very clear in the movie.) He could even second guess himself, and wonder if he is the one losing control and being a bad father/husband and directly doing all the horrific things that happen towards the end of the movie, unknowingly due to his mental state. The first half could slowly lead to a The Lighthouse type situation. We would then be presented with two different explanations via the people our main character consults for his research towards the end. Number one - Is that he is really going insane. Number Two - Is that there is something in the house/ in the tapes that changes you, like in The Color Out Of Space or Annihilation which causes the previous family and his family to be affected. We are never told what the real ending is and are left to decide, like a ‘Life Of Pi’ type of situation. So essentially you decide for yourself if the movie is a psychological horror or a cosmic horror one.

In this way, the movie escalates more and more like it did in the first half, but never plateaus with an abrupt reveal to tie everything together. Nothing being confirmed to the audience and the monster not appearing makes everything all the more memorable and doesn’t diminish the fright factor.