Into The Bughuuliverse Part 1: Sinister

Sinister is a movie that combines three of my great passions: horror films, true crime, and hate-watching terrible media so I can complain about it at length for the enjoyment of my many fans. It’s time to enter the Bughuuliverse!

Our protagonist is the fantastically-named Ellison Oswalt, a true crime writer who hit it big ten years ago but whose more recent books have been commercial failures. Teetering on the brink of a very specific level of poverty (more on that later), Ellison decides to try to crack a quadruple homicide cold-case in which an entire family were hanged from a tree, and one of the daughters seemingly kidnapped by the perpetrator. For nebulously-defined reasons, he decides to do this by moving into the victims’ house, without informing his wife that they’re living in a murder-house.

Shortly after moving in, Ellison finds a cache of super 8 film reels that depict both the murder he’s investigating and a string of similar killings, apparently filmed by the perpetrator. Realizing that he’s onto something huge, he makes the galaxy-brained decision to not inform the police. This ends badly for everyone involved when spooky stuff starts happening around the house.

I’m just going to go ahead and describe the entire plot, with full spoilers. Trust me, you’re not missing much.

Sinister settles into a very obvious pattern early on. First Ellison will watch some of the creepy tapes, taking screenshots and printing them out to put on his big conspiracy corkboard. Then he’ll hear spooky-ooky noises in the house and creep around slowly with a flashlight. Then he’ll have an argument with his wife because she wants to get out of this damn murder house and he’ll be like “We can’t leave the murder house because this book is going to be my masterpiece and it will save us from our very specific level of poverty!”

The only time the movie deviates from this pattern is when Ellison facetimes with Vincent D’onofrio, who informs him that the occult symbols found at the murder scenes are the sigil of a Babylonian deity named Bughuul, which is even funnier to hear out loud than it is to read. The Bughuul feeds on children’s souls, and Ellison assumes the murders are the work of a Bughuul-themed cult. But of course, it turns out that The Bughuul himself is the one responsible, possessing/corrupting the missing children so that they drug the rest of their family with a glowing green substance I have dubbed Bughuul Juice, and then kill them in a variety of extremely implausible ways.

This is what The Bughuul looks like, by the way:

Wait, sorry, that’s not The Bughuul. That’s Slipknot guitarist Mick Thomson. This is The Bughuul:

I really don’t know how I mixed those two up, because as you can see they’re nothing alike. The Bughuul also dresses in vaguely Michael Jackson-esque business casual, which just screams “ancient Babylonian deity” to me.

Sinister’s plot contains a large number of absurdities and elements that don’t make sense. I’m normally not a fan of the “why don’t they just get the eagles to fly them to Mordor” school of criticism; I am perfectly willing to accept “because then the story wouldn’t happen” as a reason for character actions or plot contrivances. However, this is only true to a point, and Sinister piles on the nonsensical story beats too heavily for even me to accept.

For example, right off the bat, why does Ellison move into the murder house? He has no way of knowing when he buys it that the film reels are going to be there, and in fact it would be outright delusional to expect to find any kind of evidence that the police had missed. Certainly moving to the town where the murders took place makes sense in terms of interviewing people and general sleuthing, but why the specific house?

The movie tries to skirt around this by having him claim that the murder house is the only one they can afford, presumably on account of it being a murder house, but that leads us into the Oswalt family’s very specific level of poverty. 

To begin with, the murder house is a large three-to-four bedroom bungalow with spacious gardens, a modern open-plan kitchen and a large study, so I have trouble believing it’s actually going to be affordable for a family who are apparently in such dire straits that they’re subsisting on cheap Chinese take-away instead of grocery shopping, even with the murder-house discount. But sure, whatever, it’s the only one they can afford, I’ll buy it.

But near the end of the movie they move back into their old non-murder house, and it’s a gigantic colonial mansion. This thing would cost millions of dollars. Ellison clearly made absolute bank with his previous bestseller and then shovelled most of it into buying an absurd Great Gatsby-level house (seriously, whatever you’re picturing, this house is at least twice as big), so if you’re so cash-strapped why not just sell the house and live off the proceeds for a while? Ellison claims that they’re having trouble getting rid of it for some reason, but even if they were forced to break even, that would still be a lot of money. Sell the mansion and move into something smaller while you write your next book, problem solved.

Speaking of houses, why does Ellison’s wife not realize that they moved into a murder house? Surely a simple Google search of the case her husband is investigating would bring up photos of the house, if not the exact address. And if the local townspeople are really as hostile towards the family as the movie claims, wouldn’t one of the other school moms be like “so what’s it like living in the murder house”? Wouldn’t one of the other kids at school say something about it?

But all of this implausibility pales in comparison to the pretzel-logic of the murder investigations.

The super 8 film reels clue Ellison in to the fact that the murders that happened at his murder house were actually the latest in a string of similar incidents. No one had previously figured this out before Ellison found the footage, because the prior murders never garnered a lot of attention--so little attention that Ellison, a professional true crime fanatic on the hunt for his next big case, has never heard of them. Now, keep that in mind while I describe some of the murders.

We’ve got: a kid hanging their entire family from a tree (homicide via hanging is extremely rare to begin with, and I’m pretty sure multiple people simultaneously has never happened in real life), a kid running over their family with a lawnmower, a kid strapping their family members to deck chairs and pulling them into a pool to drown them, and a kid stuffing their family into a car before setting it alight. (It’s not stated explicitly, but I assume The Baghuul’s possession gives the kids the super-strength they’d need to pull all of this off).

I probably don’t need to point out that if these things happened in real life they’d be among the most infamous murders in America, if not the world. Unsolved family massacres and missing children tend to get a lot of attention to begin with, so combine those with extremely brutal and unorthodox murder methods (one of them used a lawnmower, can you imagine how batshit that would be) and you’ve got something on par with the Zodiac Killer. Even the tamest killing, where the kid just slit his family’s throats, would at least be well-known to true crime fans like Ellison.

Incidentally, it utterly defies reason that the police never put it together that the killings are connected. In every single case all but one of the children was killed, with the remaining child apparently being abducted; all of the murders involved the victims being drugged and bound; and all of the families had moved into the house of the previous victims before being chased out by The Baghuul’s trolling. There’s no way that last factoid in particular would escape notice, it’s one of the first things any detective looking into the case would spot.

But even if you ignore all of this and just go along for the ride, Sinister completely fails as a horror movie. For most of its runtime it's simply not scary, largely consisting of lazy jump-scare scenes where sequences of Ellison creeping around his house looking spooked are punctuated by sudden, explosion-like noises as things go bump in the attic. When the supernatural elements do show up they have a total lack of subtlety, usually consisting of the Bughuul’s murder-kids, in fully-illuminated environments, with cheesy-looking makeup applied. And then there are the two Bughuul scares in which he pops out of the side of the frame like a jack in the box, one of which ruins what would have been a creepy, subtle ending shot.

The movie’s best asset by far are the film reels of the murders, which are an effective, creepy example of found footage being used in a traditional filmic narrative. They’re genuinely eerie and show a level of subtle horror craft that the rest of the movie is entirely lacking. But even here, Sinister can’t help but trip over its own feet.

I’m a great proponent of silence in horror movies. In my opinion, most horror movies except for the cheesiest of slasher romps would be improved by completely removing their musical scores, save for the occasional No Country For Old Men-esque atonal piece or David Lynch background rumble. I get that that’s a somewhat extreme position and not something your general horror audience looking to get spooped at the cinema would agree with, but in this case the tapes should definitely have been silent, with the only sound coming from the repetitive clicking of the Super 8 projector.

Instead the film reels are accompanied by the birth of a new genre, which I have dubbed Bughuulwave. I really can’t do this music justice with words, so here’s a sample:

Taken out of context, it’s actually kind of neat. It reminds me favourably of Akira Yamaoka’s Silent Hill music, and if you know how much of a Silent Hill enjoyer I am, you know that that’s high praise. In an artsier, stranger horror movie, this could have worked.

But in this movie, which is mostly shot with a total lack of creative flair outside of the short film reels, it just seems distracting and kind of obnoxious, as though the movie is desperately trying to convince you that this shit is actually hella scary, if you stop and think about it.

It doesn’t help that all of the found footage sections are accompanied by Ethan Hawke as Ellison severely under-reacting. Now, Ethan Hawke is a good actor, he’s fantastic and scary in Martha Marcy May Marlene and he’s been great in a bunch of other stuff, but in this it feels like he was directed very poorly. In particular, it seems like he didn’t know what the contents of the Bughuul tapes were going to be when the scenes of him watching them were filmed, because he reacts to seeing footage of a family being slowly murdered like he just found out that his favourite Youtuber has been cancelled for being racist. Later in the movie the Bughuul kids are meant to be cavorting around just outside of his range of vision, but it really seems like he should be able to see them a lot of the time, which also makes his performance very hard to take seriously.

I could go on at length about Sinister’s many failings--the way Ellison’s son and his night terrors vanish halfway through the movie, the way his arguments with his wife frequently don’t make any sense--but you get the idea.

Sinister is a bad horror movie, and I love it. Next up: Sinister 2!