Film Review | Sinister, dir. Scott Derrickson

Perhaps it's a lack of imagination on my part, but I cannot conceive of a trope more typical of the horror genre than the haunted house. In film and in literature, there exists a rich tradition of outwardly unblemished human habitats which the shadow of some ancient evil or recent violence has taken a secret shining to — and for good reason.

That darkness could impress itself upon a place, to play out again and again over the years on anyone who dares in their ignorance or their innocence to set foot in these sacred spaces... it's a powerful idea. One that we are immediately, even intimately familiar with, such that the haunted house requires only a slight suspension of disbelief on our part, and the most minute alterations to the classic narrative which invariably accompanies it can affect play in a major way.

Nowadays, however, we have haunted children, haunted hills, haunted histories and so on - hell, relatively recently I read and reviewed Michael Koryta's So Cold the River, which was about a haunted bottle of mineral water, if you can credit it - and with this expansion of horror's horizons, the archetypal haunted house has begun to look a little long in the tooth. I dare say there's life left in the old dog yet - see my high hopes for Adam Nevill's House of Small Shadows, coming Halloween 2013 - but give me a new idea over even an innovative spin on a predictable proposition any day of the week.

I don't know if Sinister represents a new idea, exactly - its core conceit, which is to say the haunted image (the haunted film, in fact) rather recalls Ringu - but at its best, it feels as fresh as it is ultimately familiar.

It's been a decade since true crime writer Ellison Oswalt had an actual hit on his hands, and with two point four children to support, he understands that there is but one last chance for literary lightning to strike twice. Failing that, a life of editing textbooks at best awaits. So motivated, our author, ably played by an edgy Ethan Hawke, uproots the Oswalts a final time. They move into a house which was recently the scene of a macabre multiple murder - the very uncanny hanging with which Sinister begins - though Ashley, Trevor and Tracy know little of this.

The weather seems to be with Ellison when, whilst unpacking, he comes across a box of home movies in the attic: Super 8 snuff films, after a fashion, documenting the deaths here in the Oswalt's new home — as well as a series of similarly sinister killings across the country. Sensing an extraordinary story, he opts to investigate them himself instead of alerting the proper authorities.

But when things begin to go bump in the night - when his son starts sleepwalking and his daughter takes to drawing pictures of the last tenants' little girl - Ellison realises that there may be more to these vile crimes than he had imagined, even in the darkest of his dreams.

Aside the miscasting of newcomer Juliet Rylance as Ellison's partner, who has little to do other than make ultimatums anyway, Sinister's actors are absolutely adequate. The kids aren't as central to the terror as you might suspect, given the genre, which is as well; it allows Hawke to shoulder most of the movie's most potent moments, and as aforementioned, he does so solidly. I hardly thought about his role in Dead Poets Society at all!

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Scott Derrickson directs. A fledgling filmmaker most notable, I suppose, for The Exorcism of Emily Rose, he also remade The Day the Earth Stood Still as a thankless Keanu Reeves vehicle, and developed the fifth Hellraiser film, Inferno. I'll say that he equips himself better here than he ever has in the past... but then poor direction has rarely been the ruin of his previous pictures. 

Simply put, Sinister is blessed with a better script than the rest of Derrickson's efforts were, thanks to a screenplay co-written with C. Robert Cargill. If this unnerving experience is any sort of barometer for his impending debut - Dreams and Shadows, out in the US and the UK at the end of February - I expect smart, if not necessarily seamless modern horror.

The film is far from perfect, then, but I had a fair bit of fun with it. Neatly conceived, competently composed and respectably well executed, Sinister seems to me one of the strongest scary movies of recent years. You may interpret that phrase in any number of ways, so go knowing that it's more insidious than Insidious, and approximately ten times as interesting as The Possession.

The Monday Miscellany | The Tunnel, Books to Die For, Quantum Conundrum

There's been such a ghastly glut of found footage horror movies of late that it can come as no surprise when a high-quality contender slips through the cracks. That's exactly what The Tunnel is: a shockingly accomplished shoestring spookshow very much in the mode of Paranormal Activity. No prizes for guessing that it was met with an overwhelming meh upon its release, either.

That said, The Tunnel deserves better, particularly considering how little it cost to put together. It's an interesting story, actually. Back before Kickstarter kicked off, the mooted movie's producers went to the public for funding. Enzo Tedeschi and Julian Harvery aimed to sell individual frames of the final film for AUS$1 a pop, but for one reason or another - the aforementioned attitude surely had something to do with it - they only managed to raise a quarter of their budget.

They went ahead and made the thing anyway, for about £25k. Considering this, the result is simply stunning. That isn't to say The Tunnel is without its issues, foremost amongst them an over-reliance on interviews apparently conducted after the fact of the accident - interviews which spoil who survives from the first, in fact - but the performances are uniformly strong, the scares are certainly there, and in a found footage horror movie, these aspects are of paramount importance.

The plot, meanwhile, provides a plausible rationale for the form of the film: when a news and current affairs crew take to the flooded subway under Sydney to report on the homeless living therein, they find more than they had bargained for. They find... monsters! And of course they capture them on camera.

Imagine [rec] meets The Descent. Fancy seeing that? Then The Tunnel is for you.

Oh, and hey: you can download this film for free. Legally, even! 

***

Books to Die For is an odd beast of an anthology, but for what it is, which is almost impossible to quantify, it's brilliant — and beautiful to boot. Hodder & Stoughton's lovely hardcover, out on August 30th, contains a staggering array of essays in which "the world's leading mystery writers [...] come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written."

Co-edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke, Books to Die For is essentially an insider's guide to the genre, featuring a who's-who of its foremost proponents on their favourite mystery fiction, which ranges from ye olde right through to the postmodern, covering authors including Stephen King and Douglas Adams. Joe Lansdale recommends Raymond Chandler, Max Allan Collins goes to town Mickey Spillane, Kathy Reichs writes about Thomas Harris.

Meanwhile: Michael Connelly, Jeffrey Deaver, Charlaine Harris, Minette Walters, Karin Slaughter, Lee Child, Jo Nesbo, Dennis Lehane, Peter Robinson, Elmore Leonard, Eoin Colfer, Michael Koryta, Tana French. And know that this is just a fraction of the non-fiction on offer in this massively ambitious anthology. Books to Die For is in excess of 700 pages long, after all, of which the table of contents takes eight. It even comes complete with an index!

Admittedly, some of the contributors are more immediately engaging than others, but none of the essays in Books to Die For run long at all. This is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it means the dull ones are over in no time; a curse because you get the sense some writers are only just getting into their swing when the word count comes crashing down. I'd have given a lot for a little more leg room in that regard.

All told, though, if you're in the least interested in mystery fiction, Books to Die For really is a book to die for. Now then: can we have a speculative fiction edition next?

***

When I blogged about Portal co-creator Kim Swift's Quantum Conundrum a couple of days before its release on Steam, I wasn't exactly hot on it. I'm still not, but now that actually I've played the thing - from start to finish, because it's the summer, and what else am I going to do? Go outside? - I can speak to the actual experience rather than its lackluster launch trailer.

Then again, I wasn't far off the mark, worrying about Quantum Conundrum's tepid sense of humour. Six or so hours of paltry punchlines later, if I hear Q crack another crappy joke, I'm going to snap a Star Trek: The Next Generation DVD. Don't test me, I'll do it!

Luckily, the puzzles are markedly more engaging than nonsense narrative John de Lancie is saddled with, wherein his mad scientist talks your innocent nephew through a wacky mansion. In short: Professor Fitz Quadrangle is stuck in some strange dimension, full of belly button fluff and other such stuff. It's up to the player to help him escape by powering up generators in three discrete wings, each of which introduces a new dimension.

In the first, fluffy, you can use your magical glove to make the world light and white, thus enabling you to pick up heavy things - like safes - and deposit them on weighted platforms to progress. So far, so simple — and the heavy dimension fails to make things more interesting. But when you gain the power to slow time, and finally to reverse gravity, the puzzle-solving Quantum Conundrum hinges on does pick up.

The only thing hindering your progression through the game's forty-odd test chambers then is the platforming, which is so poorly implemented as to be practically perverse. Jumps are floaty, movement is imprecise, and guys: gravity's a bitch. This is a fundamental fuck-up when the majority of Quantum Conundrum's most promising moments rely on your ability to flit around rooms on top of fast-moving objects. As to that, at least the checkpoints aren't too terrible.

Don't get me wrong: solving the puzzles in Quantum Conundrum is actually a bunch of fun. The kicker is, implementing your answers is an absolute nightmare. Add to that an inane script, a slow start, an uninspired aesthetic, and some outright derivative design decisions... folks, I'm afraid the whole package feels second-rate. Give it a miss unless you're a fan of frustration.

Film Review | Paranormal Activity 3, dir. Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman

I am, I confess, an absolute sucker for found footage films.

It's a gimmick, I know, and a lot of folks have had enough of it already... though clearly, what with all the whining you hear about Paranormal Activity and its creepy kin, these cool cats can't bring themselves to look away either. Why is that?

If you ask me, I think it's because, at best, the found footage form can cut right to the quick of what makes great horror great, which is not to say the elaborate dismemberments of the SAW series - may it burn in hell in perfect peace - nor indeed the in-your-face silliness of some CG monster, a la Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, but rather those things that you cannot see, or say you saw with any certainty; those things you can only imagine.

The proof of these things is only ever circumstantial. In your bones you know they are there, these unspeakable, unknowable awful horrors; they're just ever-so-slightly off camera, but you can hear them and feel them and ultimately fear them, because the imagination knows no bounds. And the best found footage films exist almost entirely in the imagination. Who can resist the allure of that?

For about an hour, Paranormal Activity 3 is one such film: among, I would say, the genre's very strongest. For about an hour, during which time we follow Julie and her live-in husband Dennis - mother and father figure to baby Katie and ickle Kristi, the protagonists of Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2 respectively - during the autumn of 1988, the third installment of this evidently annual franchise seems, surprisingly, at the peak of its powers. For about an hour.

The rationale for the footage itself feels a matter of happenstance taken too far, but this is to my mind the only inherent drawback of the found form - the narrative need for there to be some reason, any reason, why someone has committed all that follows to film - and I am thus inclined to let it slide.

So the story goes: back in the dark days of tape, Dennis and his friend Randy Rosen operate a small business shooting and producing wedding videos, so when things start to go bump in the night, and Kristi's relationship with her imaginary friend Toby takes a dark turn, Dennis persuades Julie to let him set up cameras around the house, the better to catch an impossible predator in the act.

And that's really all you need to know, because the allure of this narrative is not its intricacy, or its subtlety, but rather those gaps and absences you must fill in for yourself. This is never more evident than in the sitting room-come-kitchen, which is so wide that to capture it, Dennis has to mount a camera on an oscillating base - a repurposed fan that pans, often excruciatingly slowly, from one area to the other, making for any number of Paranormal Activity 3's most effective moments. One recalls the definitive moment of Paranormal Activity 2; another, involving that old reliable Halloween costume - the white sheet become a ghost - works as a fond callback to a scene from El Orfanto. In both, the tension, nay the terror thick in the theater wherein I saw this second sequel, never mind in me, was born of what was obscured, and what we could not see: the figure that appears at the door as the fan-camera tracks across to the kitchen is spooky, sure, but what set grown men and woman to tittering like children in the winter wind was the awful absence of that figure when, ten nerve-shredding seconds later, the camera returns to the scene of the scare, only to reveal that the glimpsed thing, whatever it was or was not, is gone.

Now I didn't much care for Christopher Nicholas Smith as Dennis, but as Julie, the lovely Lauren Bittner - channeling a certain Deschanel-esque quality - made me long for the 80s all over again, and I really try not to make a habit of that. The kids were cute too: Jessica Tyler Brown as little Kristi particularly. Meanwhile Dustin Ingram's Randy Rosen was fun, and there are of course cameos from the little-seen leading ladies of the first and second films in the series. Across the board, in fact, the performances this time out are strong; a pleasant change of pace given the outlandish amateurishness of the cast the October before last.

There is a moment in the early-going of Paranormal Activity 3 that makes the movie, and a moment in the daft last act that breaks it. I won't spoil either, except to say neither one is what you think it is: in fact each works in its way to poke fun at what you probably thought, and indeed this installment of the Halloween franchise is easily the most good-humoured of the three. Alas, unsurprisingly, in its final fifteen minutes, Paranormal Activity 3 turns into exactly the sort of drivel detractors of found footage films will delight in taking apart. Let them eat cake, I say!

Me? Well, I enjoyed my cake just fine, though the icing - let's face it - the icing could have been better.