Superreflections: Jump Scares & “Sinister”
Blumhouse
There’s one passage from André Aciman’s novel Call Me by Your Name that I feel supremely called out by every time I read it. Fearful of what Oliver’s departure means for their newfound love, Elio says: “There’d be plenty of time for mourning, I thought. It will come, probably on the sly, as I’ve heard these things always do, and there won’t be any getting off lightly, either. Anticipating sorrow to neutralize sorrow–that’s paltry, cowardly stuff, I told myself, knowing I was an ace practitioner of the craft. And what if it came fiercely? What if it came and didn’t let go, a sorrow that had come to stay…You lose it, as you always knew you would, and were even prepared to; but you can’t bring yourself to live with the loss. And hoping not to think of it, like praying not to dream of it, hurts just the same.”
Honestly, Elio, I’m there with you. I suspect (really, I know) that I’m an ace practitioner as well. I’m a sentimental type, reluctant to let much of anything go (which led to a certain hoarding tendency when I was kid, squirreling away personal effects that had tenuous connections to people and places in decoupaged memory boxes). And after three years in Wilmington, my home during the MFA program, through the pandemic, and some big life changes, I’m preparing for the move back north, back to places I always considered home. After giving my landlord my notice, I hid in bed, crying. What if I’ve made a terrible mistake?
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In movies, the writer is always much more confident about their artistic career. Such is the case, to the Oswalt family’s peril, in Scott Derrickson’s 2012 film, Sinister. Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) has moved his family to the country to investigate a serial killer for his next book with hopes that this might be the case to resuscitate his career. The film opens with haunted house tropes we know too well: a warning comes from the police; husband and wife talk about how this move has to be different from the last one; the daughter acts creepy painting on the bedroom walls, says she doesn’t want to be here.
Ellison wastes no time in getting to work. Ethan Hawke gives an endearing performance, costumed as the arrogant, flailing artist, often wearing a Bennington College t-shirt, glasses on clips, and always the same sweater. A former New York Times bestseller wunderkind, he needs this book to be big (in the thick of the drama, he tells his wife this could be National Book Award material). Lucky for him, (depending on how you see it) his first night he finds a mysterious box of home videos in the attic. So, he does what anyone in a horror movie would do: he sets up the projector in his office to watch.
Filmed on a Super 8, the footage is disorienting, depicting family barbeques and pool parties with jump cuts characteristic of old home videos. People suddenly appear or disappear from the frame. A cut could indicate a couple seconds or several minutes. And then in each of these, one jump cut transforms the mise-en-scène: the same setting reappears, dimly lit, often by night, with all of the family members bound, gagged, about to be murdered. The singular light from the Super 8 illuminates the scene, tracking the family’s terror as if in a deep sea investigation. And then, someone lights the match or drags the victims into the pool. They die on screen. The first time Ellison watches one of these videos, the camera cuts to a view of the projector, and the screen whites out. The shot closes the distance between Ellison and the audience: he’s watching people die on screen just like we are.
I first watched Sinister after my freshman year of college, alongside my sister and two friends (one of whom was too scared and just sat in front of his laptop the entire time). The film came out in 2012, when James Wan’s horror movies seemed to determine what contemporary horror could do: Insidious, The Conjuring, Annabelle, and their endless sequels, prequels, and spinoff origin stories proliferated, creating a somewhat interconnected universe that culminated in its apex of underwhelming horror with the 2018 film, The Nun. These films prioritize flashy effects and CGI demons, deciding that computer animation can do a better job terrorizing an audience than the viewer’s imagination and the fear of the unknown could.
At the heart of this is the jump scare. These movies give it all for the jump scare. In college, some friends and I watched Insidious during a snowstorm so intense it was a “polar vortex.” When a little red demon face appeared behind Patrick Wilson’s head and everyone screamed, I chuckled. Looking at the monster head on, it paled in comparison to what my imagination had been envisioning. I spent the rest of the movie turned off by its descent into a supernatural parallel universe.
Jump scares are a key feature for crowd pleaser horror films: we get to scream and grab each other’s hands, bonding through the experience. And with certain kinds of horror films––James Wan’s in particular––we know we’re signing up for these thrills. It’s like lining up for a roller coaster with a vertical drop, one which boasts different timing each ride. You know the drop will come but can’t quite know when. Bracing for jump scares, we steel ourselves. We know a moment will boost our adrenaline and remind us we’re alive.
Sinister isn’t without jump scares, but it tees them up for the viewer in a different way. The film is a bit more recursive in its movement: the horrors have been recorded on film. Alongside Ellison, we scan footage and images for hidden faces or hands, looking for something buried in the past to guide us into an uncertain future. The film acknowledges this: there’s much attention to the mediation of the found material. Ellison records the Super 8 footage on his digital camcorder. In one of the most gruesome videos, the footage doesn’t appear projected on the screen but reflected in his glasses. The horrors of the past must pass through Ellison in order to be conjured. As he dredges up more of the history of these murders, the ghosts and demons begin appearing in the corner, behind him when he’s not looking.
At its core, something from the past has been summoned. So when the film draws upon the thrill of jump scares, we can feel that it’s not so much the jolt of music and the burst of a demon but instead the churn of a growing, corporeal threat, conjured by a character who has reached too far into the past.
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My mom always tells this story about her family vacation in the Poconos when she was a kid. She’d really felt that she’d connected with the hotel, the staff, the place and cried when they had to leave. As they pulled out of the parking lot, somebody rang a bell and she felt it was a sign, the hotel bidding her family farewell.
Approaching another ending, I’m trying not to look back, trying not to anticipate the feelings to blunt their full expression. I’ll put the Super 8 away and just live it for now.
