It's hard for a movie to stand out in the horror genre. But in 2012,
one little film managed to break through the noise, emerging as what many horror
fans consider among the scariest movies ever made. That movie is "Sinister."
The film centers on a true crime writer who moves his family into a
house with a murderous past, where he discovers a box of
snuff films in the attic. He decides to watch them. What could go wrong?
Directed by Scott Derrickson, with a script co-written by
critic-turned-screenwriter C. Robert Cargill,
"Sinister" helped establish the business model of Blumhouse Productions – big hits at low cost.
10 years after the movie hit theaters, Slashfilm spoke with the people who worked behind the
scenes to bring "Sinister" to life. Here, in their own words, is what they had to say.
"You know there's a page in your books where
you always say nice things about the people who helped you out?"
"The acknowledgements?"
"Yeah." A foreboding dream
Director Scott Derrickson had been a fan of C. Robert Cargill's work as a movie critic,
and they became friends. One night, they both happened to be in Las Vegas and met
up for drinks. Derrickson revealed he had potential financing for a
low-budget horror movie and was looking for ideas. Cargill happened to have one.
The idea originated from a nightmare that came after watching "The Ring" in a theater. It goes
back that far, back to 2002. It was a nightmare that stuck with me so long that I realized,
about three weeks after still having the echoes of this nightmare in my head,
that if it was scaring me that much, that it'd probably scare other people.
This was in the wake of the glut of found footage movies. The first thing I liked was the idea of,
it's a movie about the guy who finds the footage, and I loved just the originality
of the Super 8 films, finding these murder films, each of them having a
murder on them that ties into what this guy is there to investigate. I just thought that
was an original concept that I had never heard before, felt fresh, and felt inherently scary.
"Something like this? You can never explain something like this."
Everything comes together
Once Derrickson took to Cargill's pitch, it was all about settling on a home for
the movie. Producer Jason Blum was looking to partner with Derrickson,
who was carefully considering his next move following the financial and
critical disappointment of his previous movie, "The Day the Earth Stood Still."
Jason came to me. He had found "Paranormal Activity" and convinced
Paramount to release it as it was, which was a huge hit. That made Jason a name.
We really liked Jason's vibe. [...] I think what I remember being the clincher
wasn't just the money. It was the fact that Jason said, "Scott, you can have final cut."
The reason why I said yes to Jason immediately was, I was like, "Okay,
this is it. If this is the last film I ever get to make..." I was
getting offered things like "Ghost Rider 2." If I had made that movie,
I probably never would've worked again. I was passing on the few things I was getting offered.
Crafting that Sinister look
"Sinister" has a very dark and distinctive look, particularly for a mainstream film. Behind the
scenes, it took a small army of people to turn out the lights, and create an environment to spend
almost the whole movie in – as well as vintage crime scenes that would look frighteningly real.
Scott and Robert Cargill, they went into it laser-focused on having a story that
essentially takes place in one house. From a production designer standpoint,
you can pretend that 80 sets cost the same thing as four sets, but it ain't
[gonna] to work. They weren't pretending. They knew that it was to be a small-budget film.
Digital [filmmaking] was just becoming mainstream then, and originally we thought we were going to
be shooting on film, and I think Blumhouse insisted that we shoot digital. Digital
is very easy to make black, but it looks very artificial where the contrast is just boosted,
and we really didn't want that. [...] So there were times where I was putting black on the
ceiling, putting black everywhere so there's no light going into certain parts of the room.
I feel like my participation in this was all the really f—ing hard s–t. [...] They had all these
different things that they didn't really think out in terms of how to shoot. I was like, "Well,
you have to shoot this before you shoot that, otherwise you won't have this clue beforehand."
"You got a map with pictures connected with yarn and everything, this is incredible…"
Many, many production designers and directors look back at the paintings of Caravaggio,
where there's this black, black, black, black, black in all of the shadows. But you are not
really allowed to do that very often in movies because they're afraid that the blackness won't
work on television [or] reshowing or whatever. In this case, that was off. So I could paint
as dark as I wanted. Chris Norr could light as dark as he wanted. That became one of our
standard tools for, how do you make the audience feel something that is just a bit over the edge?
"I guess if I thought something was in my home at night, I'd be a little bit freaked out too."
[For the attic] we designed an elevated set that Ethan Hawke could go up from
below. That whole interior of the attic was a stage build. David's plan for the
attic was way more ambitious than what we could build. [...] It wasn't about
me preferring another plan. It simply wasn't within the scope of the budget.
It was myself and my key makeup artist who got everybody through the makeup. I mean,
we did a little bit of blood and stuff, but that is disappointing because the [monster],
I didn't design or do the makeup or anything for that.
Since it was a semi-low-budget movie, when I started, they didn't have an editor yet. [...] But
they had all those Super 8 movies that they needed [editing]. So he went, "Hey, can you
edit?" I was like, "Yeah, sure." Then [...] I made all the screen recordings in conjunction
with the graphic designer and did all the graphics for it. Then finally because of
that [...] they're just like, "Hey, you've been making these screen recordings. Do you
want to do the second unit directing?" They credited me as B cam supervisor,
but it was the second unit directing which, I always say, is all the boring shots.
Trouble at the hanging tree
"Sinister" opens with a memorable (and horrifying) shot of the home's
old owners being hanged to death under a large tree in the yard. Actually getting
this scene committed to film proved to be difficult — and dangerous.
We used a real tree that we had cut down and brought in from Pennsylvania. We planted it
into the ground with a giant welded steel stand that was like a giant Christmas tree
stand. We had a time crunch because all the leaves on the tree were going to die.
The tree in the back, obviously we had stunt people hanging in the tree to do
that gag. [...] But there was a problem on the first day that we were shooting,
where the stunt really didn't go as safely and as well as it should have.
What I had to do was create a quick release so the rope would be attached to the cable,
and as it went out, it would separate from the
cable. But that means that you had to reset it every time. It was very,
very difficult. I told them this was going to be a problem. It turned into a catastrophe.
"This is much bigger than that! Much!"
The stunt coordinator who designed the rigging for the hanging shot, and who also hired the
stunt people for it, to my angry surprise, did not attend the final production meeting. Then,
to my utter dismay, he didn't show up for the tech scout either — he was apparently too busy
doing other things to show up and demonstrate exactly how the hanging shot would work.
Everything shut down when the actor came out of his harness. So basically
what they had were these harnesses and these stirrups. These guys are in these
stirrups and they're being hoisted from the back, like it's around their back.
The guy came out of his stirrups, so his harness went up around his neck.
Thankfully, the incident didn't physically harm the stunt man, but it did shake him up badly. I
was furious because the attempted stunt was clearly not safe and had not been properly
tested. I've only fired two crew members in my career, and in this instance, I fired the
stunt coordinator on the spot, in front of the rest of the crew. We shut down production for
three days, allowing us time to hire a new stunt coordinator and arrange to do the stunt safely.
They couldn't get it in like... I'm talking about the whole day. We went there at 7:00 AM
and now we are in two hours of overtime, 9:30 at night or something like that.
I feel that this incident was ultimately as much my responsibility and fault as the
stunt coordinator's. I never should have allowed his stunt to continue,
having not seen it properly tested first. [...] This incident taught me that,
and since then I have always made sure that I see with my own eyes that every
possible precaution has been taken before filming any potentially dangerous stunt.
Bughuul takes shape
While Cargill's dream had shaped the story, much still needed to be fleshed out to complete
the movie. One of the things at the top of the list was the movie's monster, Bughuul,
who is ultimately discovered to be behind each of the grisly murders.
[Bughuul] was not a part of the dream. It became a vehicle for me because I was trying to figure out,
why would these films exist? Who would make these films? [...] I came up with this idea
of it being the kids, and then why would the kids do it? I came up with this idea that I
pitched to Scott as this f—ed-up Willy Wonka. My original concept from the way it was formed
in my head would be realized on film several years later in a movie called "The Babadook."
That image was very close to what I had in my head for what Bughuul was supposed to look like.
"That looks like something from out of the occult."
I knew it needed to be something really scary and I knew that I was going to try
to make it scary by how much you don't see it. That was the whole idea of putting it in
a pool the first time you see it. I think that image of the first time that you see
Bughuul underwater in the pool is actually really horrifying and the freeze frame on it,
then the film burns up, so you don't even get to look at it for very long.
People seem to really enjoy the pool scene. I was underwater for about three hours. They
fed a breathing hose into the pool for me to stay underwater. Just before filming, they would take
it out and we stuffed a little one gallon in my sleeve so I could take a few last breaths before
the shot started. We realized early on that if I were to continue to go in and out of the pool,
everything would fall off my body, so we chose just for me to stay in the water.
The concept of Bughuul stemmed from an argument Scott and I had. I always
thought Bughuul was a demon and Scott didn't want it to be a demon. As we boiled it down,
he said, "What if we made it an ancient deity of some sort?"
"A deity? What kind of deity?"
And I said, "Like a Babylonian deity." And he goes, "Yeah." And I'm like, "Well, that's rad."
I did a ton of research. I was looking at all kinds of photography websites [...] collecting
images that I thought were interesting directions to go. I was taken with a lot of black metal face
paint that was being done at the time and had been done in the '90s. Then it came down to [an
image off Flickr. So then as I started to work on it, the more I looked at it, I was like, "This
thing's f—ing scary. It's really great." The more I looked at it, the more I thought, "Well, what if
it's just exactly this?" I contacted the artist on Flickr and bought it for $500. And that's Bughuul.
The kill tapes
"Sinister" utilizes several Super 8 movies that Ethan Hawke's Ellison
finds in the attic of his new home. These became known as "kill tapes" and were a
crucial part of the production. But at the beginning, Cargill had only imagined
the tree sequence. The others needed to be crafted as the film was coming together.
[The tree scene] was a critical response to the cold opens of most horror films,
where you have this small brief set-up of the horror we're going to experience as we get into
this movie. I was like, "What if we just go right into it? What if it's just a film and it unsettles
everyone, and then we go in, wondering, 'What the hell was that I just watched?'"
The real challenge for me was, "I can't hang a kid and get away with it." Putting the bags over
their heads sort of solved that problem. [...] It was enough to really just say,
"Here's a hanging family," as opposed to focusing on, "Oh, they're hanging a child."
You don't really think that when you're seeing it because the rest of the image is overwhelming.
We reached a point while writing it where Scott was just like, "All right, Cargill,
bring me some kills and we'll go write a script." I literally brewed a pot of coffee
and sat up in the middle of the night, just in a completely dark silent house. I got into my own
head space and I wrote down the two dozen most disturbing kills I could possibly come up with,
but that I knew kids could be capable of pulling off. [...] The next day, I sent Scott this list
of two dozen kills and the first thing he said is, "What the f— is wrong with you?"
"So you're saying the person who made this symbol is eating children?"
"Well, that would fit the stories."
There's a band named Ulver who had a 25 minute track ("Silence Teaches You
How to Sing"). It's a 25-minute piece with very different pieces of music,
with some really disturbing s— on it. I think three of the films drew the music from that
one track. They licensed it to me for $500 or something [...] I remember for each one of them,
including the hanging, I would play the music on a loudspeaker on set when we were
shooting so that people could really feel what it was meant to feel like.
We actually had to go out and shoot Super 8, which was a little nerve-wracking because the Super
8 cameras, there's not a factory guarantee on everything. [...] I kept thinking we should always
cover ourselves by doing a take on a small digital camera just in case something went wrong. The last
scene we shot, which was the bloody hallway, a lot of it was out of focus. At first we thought,
oh my god, it's a disaster. But as we looked at it, it looked so cool. We were like, "No,
this is great, actually." So it just was a mistake that ended up making it look better.
Of all the kill tapes, the lawnmower scene may rank as the most memorable — it makes
for an incredibly potent jump scare that fans still remember
to this day (and which /Film ranked as the scariest movie moment of all time).
But that is just one of several memorable jump scares in the film.
When I talked with Chris Norr, I said, "If we just got the single camera light on it
and it's raining, it's going to be a really powerful image, just this lawnmower going
through this lawn." [...] My favorite little nuance in that shot is that he had built a rig
on top of the handle of the lawnmower. He just was able to seamlessly set it in this
rig and then push the lawnmower. Because it was raining, because it was so wet outside,
the camera slipped off to the side and then it goes off the lawnmower into the
grass. He just reached out and straightened it out. It's my favorite little thing in that,
because it looks like the POV or the person just looking off to the side for a moment.
One of the first disagreements [Scott and I] had on set was about the box scare. It was written
that the box was thrown down with all the stuff in it. Then Scott had already directed to have
additional things come down. I was like, "Why are we doing that?" And he's like, "Trust me,
the audience is going to hear that first bang and they're going to jump, but they're not going
to expect the second one and that's going to get them. Then when the third one comes,
they're not going to know what the f— is going to happen." I'm like, "All right,
I'll trust you." Then sure enough, watching it in a theater, I was like, "Holy s—, he knew."
"I'm not some local moron."
I think that it's the anticipation of ... you know something really bad is going to happen,
but it's like the audience can't get to the place of knowing what it's going to be. [The
lawnmower scene] just turned out to be one of those things that, certainly, of all the things
I've ever worked on, that's the one that always gets the biggest reaction in terms of jump scares.
One of my favorite contributions to it is the lawnmower scene,
which for sure you remember. Right when you see his face, just [the loud noise]. That was me,
with Scott's direction of course. But I put in that sound and just freaked Scott out.
Burning the garage down was quite a challenge on our little budget with the special effects.
he box that the kid came out of, what I did was I had to create something
where this kid could elevate himself out of this box where it would look like he came,
almost suspended out of a cardboard box. [...] What I did was I took apart [an ab roller] and
turned it over so it was backwards. So it would follow the curve of his back.
I welded it to a frame and then I made a box to his measurements that this frame could sit
in. This kid would lay against this thing and have these stirrups that he could push against,
then he could roll up over this cardboard and come out of this box. It was chilling.
"Sinister" was crafted to be incredibly scary — especially for a mainstream film.
It was evident to most of the crew before the film hit theaters that they had pulled it off.
I had to go into this color timing session at midnight or 11:00 PM by myself. I'm
in this big screening room alone and am talking to someone on the phone in L.A.,
just talking about coloring and I was scared s—less. I was like, "Oh my God,
this is a scary film." I was actually shaking. So that's when I really realized what we had created.
It's hard working on a horror movie because you just watch the same footage over and over again.
Did I know, "Oh, this is going to be really scary?" Well, no,
it was experimental, but we knew that was the goal.
It's so abstract when you're making films because there's no soundtrack when you're
shooting it. Things are edited and the lighting is color corrected and stuff
like that. So it turns into something really scary on the cutting room floor
and in the edits, even if it doesn't seem scary when you're filming it.
I knew this was going to be f—--- awesome. When I saw the opening. When I saw what
we got from the kid coming out of the box and the way that all this s— was looking,
I was like, "This is sick. This is going to be sick."
"I got a really good feeling about this, I really do."
"Sinister" opened on October 12, 2012, and went on to become a gigantic success for
Blumhouse and Lionsgate. Against a $3 million budget, it grossed $82 million worldwide,
helping to establish the business model that Blumhouse uses to this day.
It went from idea to the screen in less than a
year. Then it was a big hit. It's just a dream scenario.
It showed to a room full of critics, my friends, people I'm acquainted with,
my colleagues. They all connected really positively to the movie. At the end of the movie,
[filmmaker] Richard Linklater came up to me, a guy I had known on and
off as a critic for years, and hugged me. He said, "Welcome to the club."
I didn't expect it to be as popular as it was and I'm very proud of the project.
Sometimes you make some really great cinema, but it doesn't get appreciated
because the movie's not successful. I'm thankful, but I was surprised for sure.
Going into it, I was unclear of what the outcome of the film would be. I actually
remember about 30 of my friends and I went and saw the movie opening night. I believe
everyone enjoyed it and it's a memory I will remember for the rest of my life,
even though the movie theater made me buy my own ticket.
We had a great opening weekend. We were the third-highest grossing R-rated film
ever in October at the time. The movies we came behind were a monster hit in "Taken 3," I think,
and the film that would go on to win Best Picture, "Argo." So it's hard to feel bad about that.
It turned out, quite honestly,
to be [the highest return on investment] of anything I've ever had anything to do with.
It made me very proud, and I was glad to be a part of it.
It's something, out of all my stuff, I'm still extremely proud of.
It was a smash success. I'm really, really proud of that movie.
I felt like I had died on somebody else's sword on "Day the Earth Stood Still." I found myself
at the end of somebody else's movie. I was like, "I'm going to make the movie
that I want to make." That's exactly what we did. [...] I've tried to operate that
way since — just make every movie like it's your last one. Because one day, it will be.
The fact that, years later, there's a conversation about our film as to
whether it's the scariest horror movie ever made, that's the dream as a horror filmmaker. That was
the moment that I was like, "Holy s—, we made it." We made something that's going to last,
that's going to endure, that horror fans are going to share for a while.