Sinister (2012) (R) ★★½

The allure of a jump scare, that perfectly-timed loud noise that sends a horror movie audience jumping, is hard to ignore. They're easy but effective — if you want to shake people up, nothing works as well as a well placed violin screech or slamming door sound effect. Thankfully, the new evil ghost movie Sinister mostly avoids the easy way out by developing its lead character, a novelist with a drinking problem, and exploring an inventive twist on ''found footage'' (the guy actually finds footage). It all works quite well… that is, until it starts relying on jump scares.

True crime writer Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) hasn't had a hit book in years, but he hopes to change his life around by investigating a set of murders committed in the backyard of a suburban home. To immerse himself in the history, Ellison moves his entire family into the house where the committed murders took place (and without telling them their new home's little secret). He immediately falls down the rabbit hole, discovering a series of Super 8 movies depicting the first killings and a string of other bizarre murders all captured on gritty film. Ellison loses himself to the movies, only flinching when his wife Tracey (Juliet Rylance) begs him to come to bed or his son Trevor (Michael Hall D'Addario) wakes up in a fit of terror from an anxiety ailment. But as he watches and rewatches the snuff films, Ellison begins to see a connection between them: a shadowy figure who, it turns out, might be a supernatural entity.

Great horror rides on its lead, and Hawke serves Sinister well. He's ambitious and overly confident of his abilities as he digs deeper and deeper into the history of the Super 8 movies. He makes some poor choices — why writers in movies are continually keeping secrets from their families and drinking way more whiskey than their finances would allow is one of Hollywood's great mysteries — but Hawke is adept at making the act of watching someone watch something interesting. His obsession with the mystery, his slowly disintegrating mind, is reminiscent of Jack Torrence in The Shining.

But before Sinister gets that involved with its central character, it strays into run-of-the-mill haunted house territory. Vincent D'Onofrio pops up for a quick expositional Skype chat to inform Ellison that the dark being in his home movies might be a Pagan deity that eats the souls of children. That would explain all those pesky kid ghosts that keep whispering in the ear of Ellison's Ashley (Clare Foley) and making creepy bumps in the night.

Sinister's most terrifying material comes from the grainy ''found footage.'' When director Scott Derrickson moves back and forth between Ellison and the films, the writer illuminated only by the flickering projector, it's chilling. But the movie progresses away from that into its own conventional horror movie. Weighed down by explanation and meandering action, Sinister loses track of its character angle in favor of the almighty jump scare. It's exhausting — but then again, as the nickname suggests, they never fail to make one jump.

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Hollywood.com rated this film 2 1/2 stars.