It’s still creeping fans out 14 years after its release and has been voted the scariest film of all time – according to science.
And, more importantly, it’s available to stream in the UK if you can handle it this Halloween.
Ethan Hawke was best known for crime thrillers and comedies such as Training Day and Dead Poets Society, so a chilling horror like 2012’s Sinister felt like a bit of a curveball at the time.
However, the film has developed a cult following over the years and often tops lists of the most terrifying horrors to ever curse a screen.
Sinister, directed by Scott Derrickson, follows Ellison (Hawke), a crime writer who moves his family to a house where a series of gruesome murders took place. When his research leads him to discover truly disturbing footage, the lives of Ellison and his family take a, dare we say it, sinister turn.
It’s one of those films that never leaves your psyche and has unsettled even the most hardened horror fans.
So it should come as no surprise that Sinister has ranked as the number one scariest horror film of them all in a scientific study. The Science of Scare Project uses heart rate monitors and a 250-strong panel to measure viewers’ psychological response to horror films.
For the fourth consecutive year, Sinister has topped the list with a heart rate spike of 131 BPM during the film and an overall scare score of 96.
Found footage horror Host, released during the pandemic in 2020, comes in second place with a peak heart rate of 130 and a scare score of 95.
Scariest films according to science
1. Sinister (2012): scare score – 96
2. Host (2020): scare score – 95
3. Skinamarink (2022): scare score – 91
4. Insidious (2010): scare score – 90
5. The Conjuring (2013): scare score – 88
It’s followed by divisive chiller Skinamarink in third place with a scare score of 91, the first Insidious with 90, and haunted house classic The Conjuring coming fifth with 88.
This year’s study has introduced 15 new films into the mix, including this year’s blockbuster horror hits Obsession, Backrooms and Undertone.
Undertone, released by A24 and comically described as ASMR for horror, is the scientifically scariest new film of 2026.
But back to Sinister, the mystery was so unnerving that even Ethan himself was ‘legitimately scared’ during filming.
‘I realised about halfway through shooting Sinister that I think the real reason that I never wanted to act in a scary movie was because I thought it would be scary to do it,’ Ethan told Flicks and Bits in 2012.
He added: ‘I think some part of me was a little superstitious that if I play that stuff I might open the door to the demons of my own mind. I’ve even been offered things like Macbeth, and I’ve found it very scary the idea of if you fully imagine this stuff, what’s going to happen to you? But the truth is that it was a lot of fun, Sinister was a lot of fun.’
A sequel was released in 2015 but struggled to capture the magic conjured up in the first instalment.
Sinister is available to watch on HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video with a subscription, as well as Apple TV and Sky Store.