Shocktober 2025 - Sinister 2 (2015)

“If you tell anyone, we’ll kill you first, and then your whole family, and we’ll watch the film over and over and over.” – Milo

Here’s a film that demonstrates perfectly the problem with most sequels to great horror movies. The best horror movies are original, and pack a punch by showing us something we haven’t seen before. A sequel will inevitably revisit the concept of the first film; thus, the element of surprised shock is missing, and with it has gone a great deal of the menace. The demonic entity of Bughuul himself becomes familiar as well. Whereas we see him kind of fleetingly in Sinister.

Sinister worked as well as it did because it was something new, and we were learning the rules as the movie went on, the real gut punch being that the murders of the entire families were being committed by the youngest child influenced by Bughuul. Sinister 2 is a half-hearted effort, with the revelatory shock of that first movie’s magnitude sadly missing.

James Ransone returns as the Deputy who helped research Ethan Hawke’s character Ellison Oswalt in the original movie. After the death of the Oswalt family, the Deputy whose name we never knew, left the police force and went on to become a private investigator when he’s not trying to destroy every location where the Bughuul murders have taken place. He approaches a house where some of the family murders have happened and should be empty – but there’s a mother Courtney (Shannyn Sossamon), and her two young sons Dylan and Zachary secretly living there, separated and hiding from an abusive husband/father.

Additionally, the spirits of some of the of the kids who’ve murdered families in the name of Bughuul are haunting the house led by Milo, slowly beginning to influence Dylan, the gentler of the two boys by showing him home movies of some of the previous family murders. As well as burying a family alive in ice and snow on a Christmas Day, allowing the victims to die of hypothermia, there’s a film showing a family tied upside down, and allowing alligators to eat them among other Super 8 films in a box containing a projector hidden in the cellar.

Additionally, there’s a sub plot regarding a ham radio, through which the Deputy can hear a Norwegian child, from back in 1973, about to murder her parents. It’s an interesting element, but not one they’ve actually explored deeply enough in the film. Zachary, the more easily tempted and more aggressive of the two sons becomes the one who is lured to take over as the killer, rather than Dylan – and the Deputy stops him in his tracks before he murders his mother and brother simply by destroying his Super 8 camera, with the makeshift screen and projector being consumed by flames, resulting in the death of Zach and the destruction of the house, while the Deputy, Courtney and Dylan escape to safety.

Or do they?

The final scene has the Deputy returning to his motel room and finding the ham radio with the message from the Norwegian girls has somehow made its way there.

Given the strength of the original Sinister, this is a weak sequel that maybe shouldn’t have been bothered with. It’s almost (but not quite) on the level of Exorcist and Exorcist 2: The Heretic as far as needless sequels to the memorable first film is concerned.

I’m glad there isn’t a third – unless it was more about the radio.