“Sinister” is the movie you’re going to see this Halloween if you want to remember what the heebie-jeebies feel like. It’s paced respectably, and its most gory elements are handled with an unusually light, lingering touch uncharacteristic of most R-rated horror films.       The plot revolves around the obsessions of a once-celebrated nonfiction crime writer who moves with his wife and children into the house where the family serving as the subjects of his next novel were all hanged from a tree in their backyard. Ethan Hawke stars as the writer, Ellison, who is hoping to pen the next “In Cold Blood.”

Ellison becomes enchanted with reels of mysterious, horrifying super 8 footage that appears in the house’s attic. By virtue of the footage, he also delves back into a previously dormant need for excessive quantities of scotch (which he uses as a numbing agent to dull his experience of viewing the aforementioned films). His drinking and shameless drive to restore his reputation as a respected author eventually (but quite expectedly) causes rifts within his quaint, quasi-British family unit.

As Ellison puts together the pieces of a series of murder cases connected with the one that took place in the house where he and his family reside, his sanity unravels quite convincingly. The ending of “Sinister” takes a turn towards the supernatural, but cuts things off before they become hopelessly otherworldly.

Although by no means a masterpiece of the genre, “Sinister” adequately and explicitly shows a portrait of madness and terror. None of the characters are given to particularly shining moments, but they all move through the spaces the movie provides without too much dawdling or embarrassing melodramatics.

If “Sinister” is guilty of anything, it’s of applying what is fast becoming a tired cliché in its second half. That said, it’s still done in a way that will cause the appearance of unsettling images in your head in the darkest hours of the night.