How Many Sinister Movies Are There?
The 80s were filled with iconic horror movie villains like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Chucky, and Pinhead. Their characters were so memorable that 40 years later, we still watch their films and many are still pumping out sequels. The 90s fell off when it came to making new, unforgettable scary bad guys. There was Ghostface for sure, and Candyman, but not much else. The 2000s produced a lot of remakes. We were revisiting those 80s boogeymen rather than seeing anything new. That doesn't mean we didn't get any terrifying horror creations, because they were there. Sam from Trick 'r Treat, the Cloverfield monster, and the entities from The Babadook and It Follows come to mind, along with Jigsaw from the first few Saw films, but we didn't have that supernatural-like killer who would keep coming back film after film to haunt our nightmares. In 2012, that almost changed with the release of Sinister, which presented a new horror villain so frightening that one study determined it to be the scariest movie ever made. One bad sequel later though, and the potential new franchise was gone, never to be seen again.
C. Robert Cargill Got the Idea for 'Sinister' From a Dream
The genius of Sinister is credited to writer C. Robert Cargill and director Scott Derrickson. The two have since gone on to work together as a director-writer duo on Doctor Strange and TheBlack Phone, but in 2012, this would be Cargill's first feature film writing credit. The plot comes from an original idea concocted by Cargill, which found its roots in a nightmare he once had after watching The Ring. In his twisted dream, Cargill goes up to his attic and finds some old Super-8 film. He plays one, which shows a family being hung from a tree, all at the same time. "That stuck with me," Cargill told Complex that year. "That haunted me for a while, and I figured, there's a story there. I thought, If I find the right story, that could be a pretty cool movie."
They had a pretty cool movie, indeed. The very first scene takes us straight into Cargill's nightmares and makes it our own with a shocking gut punch of a beginning that stands alongside some of the most intense horror openings in history. Those first images involve a Super-8 film with the camera pointed at a large tree. From that tree hangs four ropes, with a noose around the burlap-covered head at the end of each. We can tell that the four figures are a family, their lives intact by feet that barely touch the ground beneath them. We can only watch in confused horror as a saw guided by nothingness begins to cut through a branch, thus launching them upward where the family writhes until they stop moving. If you went into the theater expecting to see another cheap and forgettable horror film, you were suddenly ripped from your expected boredom by just one scene
What Is 'Sinister' About?
Sinister stars Ethan Hawke as Ellison Oswalt, a married man with a young son and daughter. He's a writer in desperate need of a hit book, so when he finds out that a family was killed by hanging outside of the home he just moved into, he decides to write about it as well as the disappearance of the family's daughter. Oswalt finds more horrifying Super-8 tapes of families being killed in the attic. The mystery deepens. Who are these people? Who is killing them? Who is holding the camera? In each instance, one of the kids in the family disappears. Where did they go?
The film works best on deepening those questions, along with how it showcases its villain, a demonic figure called Bughuul. Clad in a suit, and with a head covered in long hair flowing down over hollow eyes and a mouthless face, Bughuul haunts the edges, a form appearing in images, videos, and even in the flesh, but it's not a presence that attacks in a traditional way. Instead, he lurks, waiting for what only he knows. In the end, we know why he's here. The Oswalt family is the next to die in a jaw-dropping ending where Ellison's young daughter films herself killing her family with an axe while the Bughuul entity and the possessed missing children watch on. There is no happy ending. No one is saved. All we are left with is terror.
This new spin on a familiar story works best because of those Super-8 films. They're so realistic looking, almost like snuff films, that it's chilling. We get other tapes of a family being drowned in a pool, a tied-up family being set afire in their car, another having their throats slit, and most terrifying of all, one film simply titled "Lawn Work '86." Here, a lawnmower is being operated at night, going through the grass, a flashlight guiding the way. The tension builds into a rush of the most intense fear you can feel in a theater when suddenly a person lying on the ground appears, the mower blade heading straight for their head.
Sinister was one of the surprise hits of 2012, with word of mouth leading to a box office haul of $48 million domestically on just a $3 million budget. With that kind of success, it was a certainty that there'd be a sequel, and hopefully, a new horror franchise.
What Is 'Sinister 2' About?
Sinister 2 had a lot going against it right out of the gate. Cargill and Derrickson would return in a writing capacity, but Derrickson would not direct this time. That duty fell to Ciarán Foy. Ethan Hawke obviously wouldn't be back either, but there wasn't a star of his caliber brought in to replace him. Instead, a character from the first film who helps Ellison Oswalt in his research of Bughuul becomes the lead. In the first film, he's a character without a name, a sheriff's deputy referred to as Deputy "So-and-So." Played by James Ransone, he was a fine enough character in the first film, a supporting presence to help advance the plot of the main cast, but his character and his actor weren't big enough to carry their own film.
Why Didn't 'Sinister 2' Work?
The Deputy is now a private investigator who feels that he is all on his own in his mission to stop Bughuul. He decides to burn down the homes of every place where Bughuul has killed so it can't happen there again, but along the way, he discovers that a new family has taken up residence in a house where another family was murdered. The family is led by a single mom (Shannyn Sossoman), who is on the run from her abusive ex with her two young sons. Everything plays out as expected to the dullest degree. We get the haunted kid trope, jump scares to the max, and too many scenes of researching the monster as a way to overexplain him to the audience, along with cookie-cutter characters. There's an underwhelming subplot we don't have any reason to care about, with the abusive ex living up to the movie stereotype, and of course, Mr. "So-and-So" falling for the mom. One of the kids dies, but mom, son, and their new hero make it out alive, which is a nice change, but there's little reason to be relieved after watching 90 minutes of a film that feels like a direct-to-video imitation with little thought put into it.
Even with the underwhelming plot and characters, there is still a curiosity about the Super-8 films. Could they at least be as scary as the first film? Nope. While still eerie enough, they feel a little too slick, too overproduced. Some of them work, but the shock factor isn't there this time because we've seen it before. With a movie so boring, audiences were left grasping at a few minute-long clips to keep them invested.
The film got atrocious reviews (just a 14% score on Rotten Tomatoes) and moviegoers stayed away from Sinister 2. The budget had tripled from the first Sinister to $10 million, but only grossed $27.7 million nationwide, almost half of what the first film did. Its colossal failure destroyed what could have been a profitable new horror franchise just as it was starting.
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