Scott Derrickson discusses the horror genre and future projects

Found footage helps a true-crime novelist realize how and why a family was murdered in his new home, though his discoveries put his entire family in the path of a supernatural entity.

In what was undoubtedly the scariest movie of last year, Sinister now comes to DVD, and with a release date set for February 11 – it’s certainly one to invest in.

In the meantime, we caught up with the film’s director Scott Derrickson, to discuss the title, while the filmmakers also takes a candid look at horror genre as a whole, and let’s us know about his future projects.

I’m calling in regards to the DVD release for Sinister, so for those who missed upon it’s release, can you tell us a little about it?

The movie is about a true crime writer played Ethan Hawke who moves into a house where a terrible crime has occurred because he’s going to write his next book about this crime, but he hasn’t told his family – and in particular his wife – that the crime he is writing about actually took place in this house. So he moves in, and some terrible things ensue. He finds a box of super eight films in the attic, and one of them contains a film of the actual crime he is investigating, along with other crimes that date back to the 1960’s – and then things take a supernatural turn [laughs].

I interviewed C. Robert Cargill and he said that the story first came about following a nightmare he had and I was wondering at which point you came on board?

Cargill was a critic for Ain’t It Cool News, a very popular film website here in the States, so I’d be reading his stuff for years. I was such a fan of his writing I had struck up an email relationship with him because I thought he was a great critic. We never had any intentions of working together but I ran into him at Las Vegas a little over two years ago and we went to have a drink together and he pitched to me the idea of Sinister and I told him that I thought it was an amazing idea and that we should do it as a movie, and we did, so it’s great. It was just one of those things where fortune shined upon us.

You’ve done a fair amount of horror movies to date, what is it about the genre that appeals to you so much as a director?

It’s very cinematic, there’s an openness to very ambitious imagery, which I really like. I think science fiction and horror are probably the two genres that are the most welcoming to big ideas, you know, you can have big, ideological concepts in these movies that would be overbearing in other genres of filmmaking, certainly in straight genres. But I think that I have ultimately ended up working in this genre because I’m good at it, you know. It’s like knowing how to tell a joke, I know how to scare people. I have a lot of personal experiences with fear, it’s an emotion that I understand and I think it’s perhaps the most significant human emotion in terms of what drives us the most in our lives, and yet it’s not often taken seriously enough by story tellers and filmmakers, so the exploration of fear is something that’s really important to me.

There is some light-relief in Sinister though, with a handful of funny moments – how important do you think they are to the overall enjoyment of the feature?

That varies from film to film, but in this instance it was critical. Sinister is a pretty unrelenting movie and it starts off right out the gate promising you that you’re in for something that’s pretty hardcore and you can feel when an audience watches this movie that this movie gets to people, and it is very scary and unrelenting. So when Deputy So and So shows up and starts saying the things that he says, it’s just a tremendous welcome relief to the audience. I think that he is very funny and it wouldn’t work if he wasn’t, but it’s almost like that feeling of listening to an audience laugh almost harder than they ought to because the relief is so necessary at that point.

Despite directing the movie, are you yourself able to get scared by it when watching?

I don’t get scared by it but there are certainly things that I find disturbing. The super eight films still bother me when I watch them, and I do have moments watching it when I think, there must be something wrong with me [laughs] because it still affects me. But if it doesn’t scare me, or disturb me, then why would I ever expect it to scare an audience? I don’t think a lot of horror filmmakers actually think that way, a lot of them are, without really being aware of it, standing above their audience, taking pleasure in the fact they are going to scare them. I take pleasure in scaring the audience, but I don’t approach it that way, I approach it in the point of view of what I find scary, and I trust that if it scares me, it’ll scare them.

What is your take on the horror genre at the moment?

I think horror is in a bit of a precarious position. I love Paranormal Activity, I thought it was a great movie – but I don’t particularly love what it has given birth to, and movies that are cheaper and lower production value and therefore less and less cinematic and less story driven, while the whole found footage aesthetic is something that is just not my favourite kind of filmmaking. You know, I like films that have great visual design, I like films to have a musical score, these fundamental movie elements. I think that for me if a horror film doesn’t have real characters and some real ideas underneath it that have meaning, there is no way that I’m going to love it, even if it is scary. A horror film has to be scary for me to love it, but if that’s all it is that’s not enough. Like a comedy that makes you laugh but doesn’t have any real characters or story, you forget about it by the time you’re in the parking lot, and I certainly like horror films that resonate with me and make me think about them later, and have high aesthetic qualities as well, that’s the stuff I like and the stuff I aspire to make.

Back to Sinister, how much does it help having someone of the calibre of Ethan Hawke take on the lead role? You must have been thrilled to get him on board?

I mean, he is one of the best actors in the world. He is definitely my favourite actor that I’ve ever worked with and you know, I don’t know what this movie would have been like without him. I can’t imagine it, it would have been something totally different. He works so hard and is such a truthful, complex actor. He connected with what mattered to me in the movie. I didn’t just want to make a movie that’s scary, I really wanted to make a movie about ambition and about how there are all these things for Hawke to get scared from in the movie, but there is no fear in his life that is more potent than his fear of losing his own status, that’s the biggest fear in the movie, that fear trumps all the other scary things that happen to him, because as scary as all the shit is that happens, he doesn’t leave the house because he has to stay there to win his national book award – not being famous or successful is his biggest fear. I think Ethan really liked that and as a result invested deeply in the character and did some amazing work.

As for another of your projects – The Devil’s Knot – this is a story that has been brought to life over here in the UK recently through the documentary West of Memphis, as the writer of the piece – as soon as you heard about this amazing tale did you think, I have to make a movie about this?

I had seen the Paradise Lost documentaries and followed the case with great interest for many years, and then I was approached by the producers who bought the non-fiction book The Devil’s Knot, and when I read it I just thought, gosh, there is so much more to this story than what has been portrayed in the documentaries, and what was interesting to me was the specific details surrounding the infiltration of religion and the religious hysteria into the investigative and judicial processes and I just thought that was fascinating. So I rolled up my sleeves and did an obscene amount of research on the case and then wrote the script.

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SINISTER  COMES TO BLU-RAY AND DVD ON MONDAY FEBRUARY 11