The Black Phone 2 is set to turn Ethan Hawke’s child-abducting villain The Grabber into a surprising modern horror icon (it’s partially surprising because he definitely died in the first Black Phone), continuing a successful horror collaboration between Hawke and director Scott Derrickson that began over 10 years ago. The two of them, plus screenwriter C. Robert Cargill, first worked together on 2012’s Sinister, one of the best original horror movies of the 2010s — though Get Out is a strong contender and The Conjuring doesn’t count because it’s based on the “true” stories of Ed and Lorraine Warren. Either way, if the return of The Grabber has you eager for more Derrickson/Hawke horror, we have good news: Sinister is streaming for free right now on both Tubi and The Roku Channel.
Certainly eligible for “underrated cult classic” status, Sinister only has a 64% on Rotten Tomatoes but made $82 million on a $3 million budget internationally. That alone was probably a big factor in convincing Marvel to give Derrickson the job of directing Doctor Strange, which is quietly a very solid entry in the ever-expanding MCU canon (and it contains the franchise’s best joke). There wasn’t quite enough water in the well to support the less-successful Sinister 2, which Derrickson handed off to director Ciarán Foy.
Why Is ‘Sinister’ the Best Original Horror Movie of the 2010s?
Ostensibly a haunted house movie, Sinister’s big hook is the discovery of a box of Super 8 “home movies” that actually depict multiple families being horribly murdered. The videos themselves are extremely unnerving, even before the ultimate reveal of, say, an entire family — save one child, who later goes missing — drowning to death in a swimming pool, and Sinister makes brilliant use of the inherent spookiness of outdated, lower-quality video formats. It doesn’t predate the kind of low-fi scares that people put on YouTube, but it’s arguably the most effective depiction of the terror of stumbling onto something you don’t understand in a mainstream horror movie. It’s just genuinely very scary in a way that a lot of other movies like this aren’t.
Sinister stars Hawke as a struggling true-crime writer who got famous for writing one successful book that helped catch a killer… and then a bunch of follow-up books that nobody liked. He and his family have just moved into a new house, but his wife (Juliet Rylance) doesn’t know that the previous owners of the house were all murdered by someone who was never caught. Hawke’s character hopes that he can solve the mystery and write a book about it, so when he discovers the aforementioned box of murder movies, he thinks it’s the key to finding the truth and getting famous again. That gives him the appropriate level of hubris for a horror movie protagonist, so you can walk away thinking that what happens is kind of his fault — even if it is still extraordinarily mean.
At the same time, spooky things start happening in the house involving ghostly children and a boogeyman-like character called Mr. Boogie, and much like The Ring (a somewhat obvious source of inspiration), it starts to seem like something the good guys can “win” even though it’s definitely not. The movie also stars the great Vincent D’Onofrio in a too-brief cameo and James Ransone from It Chapter Two (who goes on to become the main character of Sinister 2). Again: It’s free on Tubi and The Roku Channel!
- Release Date
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October 12, 2012
- Runtime
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110 minutes
- Director
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Scott Derrickson
- Writers
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Scott Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill
- Franchise(s)
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Sinister