In the off-beat Scott Derrickson film “Sinister,” we follow Ethan Hawke’s character (Ellison Oswalt), who is a true-crime writer, that happens to stumble onto a story of a missing-girl case, and it soon becomes his obsession. His reasoning is quite narcissistic, as he believes it’ll lead him to another bestseller. The film isn’t really gripping for its writing, but it definitely is scary and worth it for horror and psychological thriller buffs.

Soon in the story, Oswalt’s wife (Juliet Rylance), who is just uprooted to move to a new town (so her husband can investigate the new story), and already getting bad vibes from neighbors, asks in the film, “We didn’t move a few doors down from a crime scene again, did we?,” he assures her they didn’t. But, soon the moviegoer realizes, she just asked the wrong question.

Oswalt buys the very house in which four members of a family were slain, with the fifth abducted. An ornery sheriff (Fred Thompson) stops by before the boxes are even unloaded to warn the author he’s not a fan of his books, and doesn’t cotton to a fame-hungry scribbler second-guessing his department’s work.

Local policemen may not be helpful, but soon it becomes the least of Oswalt’s worries. He later finds a box of Super-8 films in the attic, each showing a family being murdered in a uniquely grisly way. Believing he’s stumbled across his own “In Cold Blood,” he stays up nights scrutinizing the films and looking for connections between killings whose locations and victims are still unknown.

Hawke believably soon finds himself consuming bottles of whiskey, swigging whiskey as he struggles with the horrible things he’s seeing. However, the film quickly shifts into horror-mode, with an unseen visitor leaving clues for Oswalt in his own house and taunting him with increasingly unsettling (and harder to explain) stunts.

Screenwriter C. Robert Cargill would have benefited a bit, by making Haweke’s character more frightened than intrigued. And after I saw the ending, I realized, it’ll become a franchise, much like “Paranormal Activity.”

“Sinister” opens on Friday around the country, and Highlight Hollywood gives the film Three and a Half Stars. For horror buffs, it’s not bad at all.

You can follow us at www.twitter.com/HighlightHwd.

Written By: Tommy Lightfoot Garrett
Photographs are Courtesy: Summit Entertainment
Follow us on Twitter @HighlightHwd or @LightfootinHwd