Sinister's Children Filmed Horror As A Haunted House Game

In the house used for Sinister, the basement was as large as the house itself. It became the production offices, and the green room where the child actors waited sat on couches right beside the desk of writer C. Robert Cargill.

One afternoon, Cargill could hear the children talking among themselves downstairs. They had started comparing notes on the story, specifically on what their characters did to their fictional parents.

One boy asked another how he did it. As Cargill recalled it, the boy answered, "oh, I kill them with a lawnmower." "Aw, I just drowned mine," another answered, as casually as kids swapping costume ideas.

Hawke said that ease was by design. Director Scott Derrickson, who led the horror film starring actor Ethan Hawke as a true crime writer, framed the frightening work as play, much like building a haunted house with friends.

Hawke said Derrickson made it sound like a sleepover. It is 10 o'clock, all your best friends are over, everybody has popcorn, the campfire is lit, and someone is about to tell a scary story to give you the chills.

Children love that kind of game, Hawke said, and they commit to it fully. They are really imagining it, completely, but they are not identifying with it as something real and happening to them.

That distinction became a tool Hawke kept. For The Black Phone, in which he played the child kidnapper known as the Grabber, he said he tried to think like a small child at play and imagine being someone who enjoyed cruelty, then let it pass through him.

The performance stayed at work. Afterward, Hawke said, "I would go home to my own children and take them out for ice cream."

Back in the Sinister basement, Cargill could hear the kids talking about killing their parents from his desk nearby.