Sinister

Sinister (2012) is the horror film you can watch online on iFILM. A true-crime writer, years past his one big hit, moves his family into a new house and neglects to mention one detail to his wife: the previous family was hanged from the tree in the backyard. Scott Derrickson directs.

Up in the attic, Ellison finds a box of old 8mm home movies. Each reel starts as ordinary family footage and ends with that family being murdered. He sits down to study them frame by frame, hunting for the book that will put his name back on the shelves, and slowly notices the same figure lurking in the background of every film. The longer the projector runs, the worse the nights in the house get. Ethan Hawke plays a man pulled forward by ego more than fear; Juliet Rylance and Vincent D'Onofrio, as a professor decoding the impossible over the phone, round out the cast.

Derrickson wrote the script with C. Robert Cargill, the pair who would later make Doctor Strange. The real trick here isn't the jump scare but the footage itself: grainy images and a grinding score that makes you want to mute the screen. The entity called Bughuul is built almost entirely out of that texture. Stream Sinister (2012) online on iFILM.