Nightmare Fuel / Sinister

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Sinister

Hanging Out '11

• Every one of those damn reels. Which are every single doing of Bughuul.
  • Let's see... Families (including young children) slowly lifted off the ground by their necks while they twitch and spasm, until they're all still. This scene (and the projector that played it) came from the nightmares of writer C. Robert Cargill after he first watched the American version of The Ring.
  • Bound and gagged in a car that is lit on fire (and begins rocking furiously).
  • Taped to weighted lounge chairs and pulled into a swimming pool with only their jerking feet left above the water.
  • Throats slit casually while tied to their beds.
  • And last but not least, the damned lawn mower. Not even the movie thought it was a good idea to show that particular bloodbath.
    • Additionally, there's also that last-second Jump Scare, just because.
    • And we can only imagine what's on the newest tape... oh wait, Ashley was kind enough to leave some illustrations: the family was hacked to pieces with an axe.
• Bughuul's face's appearance on the surface of the waters of the pool.
  • On the laptop's screen, his image moves.
    • The way he does it, just casually looking at Ellison before turning back.
  • Bughuul appearing in the backyard. You saw it in the trailers, you knew it was coming, but it's nonetheless one of the most terrifying parts in the movie.
• The ghosts themselves are deemed as this.
  • The scene where each one of the ghosts follow him around the house, sometimes close enough to touch, yet he can't see them. They cause creaks and other noises, and it seems like he catches small glimpses of them when they turn a corner, but the simple fact that in his eyes, there's nothing there, puts a whole new level of scare into Nothing Is Scarier.
  • Next day, he invites over Deputy So-and-So for tentative confession of his suspicions. You might think daylight, and the presence of the gentle, endearingly awkward Deputy might ease the threat. With some help from the score, the dread is as strong as ever - there's simply no denying that something both diabolically vicious, and quite possibly supernatural, is involved in these murders.
    Ellison: I don't believe in any... you know, stuff.
    Deputy So-and-So: Stuff, you mean, the supernatural, the paranormal, the metaphysical, that kind of stuff?
    Ellison: Right!
    Deputy So-and-So: Right, of course you don't - you never would've moved into a crime scene if you did, but here we are, having this conversation...
    Ellison: But there was... none of that... with the Stevensons?
    Deputy So-and-So: No... in the short amount of time that the Stevensons lived here, they never called the police, they never had the police called on them, or reported anything bizarre that came up in the investigation... Do you wanna know what I think?
    Ellison: Yes.
    Deputy So-and-So: I think that you moved yourself into the house of murder victims, and immediately set about trying to put yourself in their head space. I also think you've begun discovering things about this case that go to darker places than you were prepared for. I also think that every time I've been to your house... there's a whiskey bottle in your office, that doesn't seem to be the slightest bit neglected - I'm not saying that you have a drinking problem... nor do I think you're making any of this up to get attention. What I do think is... you're under so much stress, you've put yourself under so much stress, that your mind is trying to process all of it at once.
    Ellison: So you don't believe in any of that... otherworldly stuff, right?
    Deputy So-and-So:{solemnly concerned, and in total earnest} Are you kidding me? I believe in... all that stuff. I... I wouldn't sleep one night in this place, are you nuts?
• Trevor's night terrors. The trailers made it look like the first one (in the box) would occur later and be of Bughuul's doing, so it was completely unexpected that something like this would happen so soon. Then later when Ellison is investigating seeing Bughuul in the yard, and he sees his son's completely white, horrified, shaking face peering out from a gap in the leaves. Right where Bughuul had been seconds before.
• The drawings on the wall, particularly the one of Stephanie.
• The music that plays when Ellison burns the reels and projector and during the credits, courtesy of Boards of Canada. In the reel burning scene, you can hear high-pitched screams if you listen very closely. Also to add the films later on used ambient songs from Norway project Ulver, using certain songs like this.
  • The whole soundtrack in general. From something that sounds like a haunting satanic ritual to this
• The implication that the horror may easily continue, because if Deputy So-and-So starts investigating the killings following Ellison's death, he'll start searching for the case and once again plastering Bughuul's face all over the wall.
  • Or the professor Ellison was talking with online will, when the gruesome murder of a famous author's family hits the news and reporters start tracking down whether the research he'd been doing on his next book was connected to it.
  • Deputy So-and-So already knows what happened and has proven to be quite Genre Savvy. The rest of the authorities, on the other hand...
• The overall sense of unease in the film, because there is a lot of movie shots were Ellison is alone in the night, with half the screen showing a darkened corridor. The audience keeps expecting something to suddenly crawl out of the shadows, and turning on a light or waking up his wife wouldn't have helped Ellison at all.

Sinister 2

• The sequel's reels don't seem to be any better:
  • Tied up in a flooded kitchen with live wires at the ready.
  • Hooded and hung upside down over a swamp filled with gators.
  • Being crucified and set on fire.
  • Tied to a dentist's chair and having your teeth get mutilated with an industrial drill.
  • Nailed on a floor with rats on their bellies and then trapped under a hot container of some kind. Said rats escape by eating their way out.
  • Buried in snow up to their faces on Christmas night and left to freeze to death. The worst is the victim who hasn't died yet, and turns her eyes toward the camera in the final shot, breath escaping in the cold air.
• In a sudden swerve from the paranormal focus, Clint is one of the scariest elements, to the point that he counts as the film's Big Bad Wannabe. He's simply an abusive asshole of a husband who has every police officer in the state in his pocket, including the sheriff himself.
  • The scene with him at the dinner table, where he suddenly snaps and assaults his son when he won't eat, shoving food over his face and angrily berating him.
• We finally find out what happens if a child fails to complete a tape, as Zach does in the finale after Deputy So-And-So breaks his projector. Bughuul walks up behind him while he yells at the ghost children, rests a decayed hand on his shoulder, and slowly rots him away until he's nothing but a skeleton. Then he torches the house and moves on.
  • Zach in general is unnerving from the second half of the film. While early on he was seen as an average, if angry kid, he really goes off the rocker and begins to show sociopathic levels of cruelty and assholishness, even going so far as to state that his movie would be the best one yet. Talk about Enfante Terrible.
• The Norwegian Hell Call. A woman's bloodcurdling, agonised screams are heard while her young daughter calmly plays piano and tells her to quiet down so Bughuul can hear the music. What exactly was happening to the poor mother is left to our imagination.

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