Sinister 2 is more of the same old frights
Other people’s home movies are never much fun. In the Sinister franchise, they’re downright deadly.
Both the original (from 2012) and the sequel feature just discovered old-school Super 8 reels where parents and children’s mundane domestic pursuits (swimming in a pool, opening Christmas presents, etc.) lead to their murders (electrocuted in water, buried in snow). It’s as though someone sat through one too many family gatherings and snapped.
Always lurking in the background is a supernatural villain with a gruesome sense of irony and a dubious grasp of style: Bughuul looks like a cross between an undertaker, a death-metal drummer, and a homicidal clown.
Just like him, the Sinister films, produced by low-budget horror hit-factory Blumhouse (Paranormal Activity, Insidious), are hodgepodges of genre tropes that occasionally cohere into something unsettlingly fun — or at times in Sinister 2, just downright disturbing.
In the first Sinister, policeman “Deputy So-and-So” (James Ransone, best-known as Ziggy Sobotka in The Wire) discovers that Bughuul (Nicholas Price) attacks the new inhabitants of homes where he has murdered before — but only after they move out. Here, he’s private investigator “Ex-Deputy So-and-So,” who spends his spare time burning down buildings where Bughuul has struck. Just as he turns up to a supposedly empty house in rural Illinois with cans of gasoline, he bumps into Courtney (Wayward Pines’ Shannyn Sossamon), who’s hiding there from her abusive estranged husband with their twin nine-year-old boys (siblings Robert Daniel and Dartanian Sloan). The P.I. sets out to help them fend off Bughuul — while convincing them not to leave.
There are endless dark corners (even in broad daylight), a spook-filled basement with enough found footage to start a snuff-film archive, a paranormal expert to explain everything in five-syllable words, flashes of self-awareness, and of course, children who see things their parents don’t. Bughuul has a habit of turning one child against the rest of the family. Will there be — gasp! — an evil twin?
Director Ciaran Foy crafts a tense atmosphere with his handheld cameras, and the doe-eyed Ransone has a self-deprecating charm, but poor underwritten So-and-So spends most of his time wandering from one jump scene to the next, whether staring at his laptop or poking around those dark corners. Sossamon is charismatic, and the Sloans have an engagingly feisty rapport. At its best, the film goes gothic, and outrageous violence explodes from domestic tension.
Bughuul is apparently a Babylonian god who persuades children to commit atrocities against the rest of their (white, American) families, and the opening scene is a Super 8 film of three hooded people trussed to crucifixes, one of whom is set on fire to burn alive. Sinister 2 doesn’t so much hold up a dark mirror to cultural fears; it reproduces what our real-life ISIS Bogeymen have done. Don’t blame writer/creators Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill — the film was shot last summer, before the execution videos — but found-footage horror has been co-opted. Maybe it’s time to find new ways to scare ourselves.