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I enjoy watching Ethan Hawke getting the shit scared out of him. Sinister is a kooky stew of horror themes including the isolated writer, found-footage deaths, haunted houses and scary children. They’re all presented in sporadically creepy fashion by director Scott Derrickson, with Mr. Hawke at the center of it all expertly hyperventilating.

Hawke plays Ellison Oswalt, a true crime author 10 years removed from his last big hit and looking for inspiration. He moves his family into a house where another family was hung from a tree in the backyard. Derrickson actually starts his movie off with the image of said family being hanged, one of the film’s many haunting images.

Oswalt finds a box of home movies on Super 8—along with a rather disgusting scorpion—in the attic, and sets about watching them. This is the first of many bad decisions he makes. Actually, it’s the second, when you consider Oswalt moving into this creepy house in the first place.

The movies are snuff films compiled since the ’60s, and they totally suck to watch. One depicts a family being drowned in lounge chairs in their pool, another shows a different family having their throats slit, etc. Oswalt gets the notion that perhaps he should call the police, but fame beckons, and he concludes all of this will contribute to one helluva book.

Oswalt, like many horror film protagonists, is a genuine idiot.

As the horror factor ratchets up, Oswalt just sticks around the house. His young son crawls out of a box screeching, looking not unlike Linda Blair doing the spider walk thing in that cut scene from The Exorcist. He just puts the kid to bed and goes back to watching snuff films.

A local deputy (James Ransone) steps in to help Oswalt with some fact-finding. Turns out the murders are all connected in a way that should provide Oswalt with yet another reason for moving out. Nope, he stays.

That same deputy connects Oswalt with a professor type (Vincent D’Onofrio) who informs him that symbols found at the murder sites are connected to an ancient monster called Bughuul that eats children’s souls. Upon hearing this, Oswalt has another cup of coffee and continues his research, rather than bugging out with the fam.

Derrickson, who also co-wrote the screenplay, has a gift for telegraphing his scares—and still making them scary. He’ll put Hawke’s head in a dark frame, letting you know damned well something else will soon appear. It appears—and it’s freaking scary. He’ll give you a moment of hesitation when you know a jolting sound will happen. That jolt eventually comes, and you knew it would come—and it’s still freaking scary.

My face went cold many times watching this movie. People around me either got up and left or started crying.

Hawke does terrified with the best of them. Think of his looks of horror when observing Denzel Washington breaking rules in Training Day, or that panicked expression on his face as things spun out of control in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.

As Oswalt’s stressed out wife Tracy, Juliet Rylance drags on the movie with a poorly modulated performance. As the two kids with a dad who blows at picking houses, Michael Hall D’Addario and Clare Foley make up for some of Rylance’s slack. Foley is especially good at occupying the stereotypical “creepy daughter who talks to ghosts” role.

We only see the monster Bughuul in a few quick moments, but boy, are those effective moments. There’s a sequence involving a swimming pool that had me walking with quicker strides to my car out in the dark parking lot after the movie.

The folks who wrote Sinister are sick in the head. That’s an attribute that bothers me if the afflicted one is my next-door neighbor. When the guy making a horror movie is a little nuts, it’s a blessing.