Sinister 2

Before my screening of Sinister 2, I happened to be watching a video interview with Don Mancini, the man best known for creating the Child's Play/Chucky horror franchise, and who has written all six films (and even directed two of them) in the series about the homicidal little doll.  According to him, the hardest part about writing a series of horror films is keeping the monster a mystery as much as possible as the sequels go on.  After all, the fans expect more of the creature, but if you show too much of it, it no longer becomes scary.  I thought back on those words while watching this movie, and wondered if screenwriters Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill struggled with this concept.

Sinister 2 gives us so much of its demonic villain, Bughuul, and a small Greek Chorus of ghostly children that it loses all sense of mystery and starts to become kind of goofy.  In the original Sinister from 2012, Bughuul mostly stayed in the shadows, or popped up in the occasional photograph or home movie.  Here, he's still lurking in the shadows, but he also lurks in broad daylight, in a motel room, in a computer, and even in a ham radio.  It feels a little like overkill.  What's worse is that even though he seems to have more screentime in this one, his effectiveness of being a creepy demon has lessened.  There are just way too many scenes where Bughuul just kind of stands there in the background, not really doing anything.  It starts to almost look like he doesn't realize the camera is rolling, and he's still waiting for the director to give him his cue. 

Bughuul is still corrupting the innocent, forcing children to murder their families and film the carnage on old 8mm home movies.  In the first movie, these short films were genuinely creepy and added to the suspense.  This time, again, it feels like overkill.  I understand that it is the norm in a horror sequel to go bigger with the death scenes than in the previous movie.  But some of these murders we witness become unintentionally hilarious, because they're so elaborate, you wonder how a kid could pull them off, even if they were under the control of a demonic entity.  In one of the "home movies", a kid ties up his family upside down over a lake, then seemingly unleashes an alligator into the water, who decapitates each family member with its huge jaws.  In still another, a kid seems to have learned his way around an electrical box so that he can electrocute his entire family who he has forced to stand in a pool of water.  Those evil children have now become ghostly followers of Bughuul, and basically stand around thinking they look a lot scarier than they are, and force other living children to watch their murderous acts on an old film projector in the basement.

On the human side of the plot, one of the survivors of the first movie, a nameless Deputy (James Ransome), has quit the police force and devoted his life to tracking Bughuul down and stopping further tragedies from happening.  In the original Sinister, this character served as a comic relief.  Now he's been upgraded to a take-charge hero/romantic lead, and it just doesn't work.  The character worked better when he was a sidekick.  His trail of the demon leads him to Courtney (Shannyn Sossamon), a mother who is on the run with her two young boys, Zach (Dartanian Sloan) and Dylan (Robert Daniel Sloan), from her abusive and cartoonishly evil ex-husband (Lea Coco).  The mom and her two sons are currently hiding out in an abandoned farmhouse that just happens to come with its own abandoned church, where a mysterious and violent murder happened years ago.  No prizes for guessing if this spooky looking location is the current stomping ground for old Bughuul.

While Courtney and the former Deputy start to get close to each other in a romantic subplot that goes nowhere fast, little Dylan starts being visited late at night by the ghostly kids of Bughuul, who lead him downstairs to watch their snuff films about how they killed their families under the influence of the creature.  This is supposed to somehow convince Dylan to join them and kill his own family, I think.  In one of the film's stranger plot developments, Dylan's brother Zach learns about this and is actually jealous.  He wonders why the ghosts chose his brother and not him.  For a horror movie, Sinister 2 does at least seem to be saying something about abuse, and the psychological effects it can have on children.  But it never connects in a satisfying way.  We keep on watching those home movies that are more over the top than terrifying, and then we get an extremely silly climax that seems to be trying to combine your standard haunted house conclusion with Stephen King's Children of the Corn.

There's just not a single moment that's scary, believable or subtle here.  Everything is played to the rafters.  When the boys have dinner with their abusive dad, he bellows at them while smashing mashed potatoes in their faces.  Whenever somebody's in a dark and creepy hallway, you can bet that there will be jump scares accompanied by a loud sting on a soundtrack, or a false alarm.  And while I do think that the abused and shattered family could have created some genuine drama, it's just not dramatically satisfying.  It's going through the motions, instead of really allowing us to get close to these characters who are trapped in this horrible situation.  Having more real and fragile characters could have also made the movie more terrifying, or make us fearful for them.  But the scenes that are supposed to be scary are far too mild and tame. 

The original Sinister was not a great movie.  Heck, it made less sense the more you thought back on it.  But, at least it had some genuinely creepy moments and a strong atmosphere.  Both of these elements are gone from this sequel, so all we can focus on are the flaws.  This movie actually manages to make less sense than the first one, so maybe a better production would not have been able to help it.  But, it couldn't have hurt.

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