One of the most difficult things in horror filmmaking is sustaining the audience's fear response for the length of an entire film. Every entry in a given horror series makes it that much harder to keep fans on the edge of their seat, especially when the first follow-up sinks everything enjoyable about the original.
Blumhouse Productions is a complex studio. Their "throw everything against the wall and see what sticks" method has seen massive success and comical failure in almost equal measure. For every beloved hit that fans know as the studio's work, half a dozen total misses are forgotten as quickly as they came.
At its heart, Sinister is a horror film built around establishing its own rules. The story follows the ever-reliable Ethan Hawke as Ellison Oswalt, a washed-up true-crime writer who quietly moves his family into a home that was recently the site of a gruesome multiple-murder. Oswalt settles into the extremely unpleasant process of investigating the crime, but strange and supernatural happenings begin to disrupt his family's life. The nightmarish event is captured on an 8mm film reel, and the investigation unveils more reels, establishing a terrifying pattern. As his marriage is torn apart and his kids are rendered disturbed, the nightmarish truth begins to reveal itself. Oswalt reaches out to a charismatic cop and a devoted expert to uncover the truth. They discover an ancient evil being called Bughuul, a pagan deity with a serial killer-like pattern of slaughtering entire families and seizing a single child to add to his entourage. Strange events at the haunted home are revealed to be symbols of the evil being, and his image serves as a gateway to our reality. Oswalt figures out the rules just in time to run afoul of them, leading to a grisly fate and a downer ending.
The fact that the driving force of the plot is a group of people with different levels of information trying to figure out the rules of the horror movie they're in is a brilliant way to introduce the audience to its world. Oswalt and the experts figure out what they're up against in tandem with the audience. There are definitely things worth complaining about in the film, but the clever writing and performances sell it as a solid horror movie. On top of that, it manages to be consistently scary, while also being a solid family drama. Everything that the original Sinister does well is done wrong by Sinister II, and every major problem with it is made substantially worse.
Sinister II features a lot of things that fans of the first film would have thought they wanted after the first film wrapped. James Ransone's fan-favorite character Deputy So-and-so takes the lead role, the new family is interesting, and Bughuul takes a more active role. The Deputy, now a private investigator, is changed by his encounter with the Oswalts and Bughuul, leading him to pursue breaking the chain of new victims. Bughuul's rules are fairly specific, requiring a family to move into a home where a previous group of his victims once lived. Bughuul's vengeance doesn't take effect, however, until the new family selects a new home and moves. When a single mother and her twin boys take up residence in one of the cursed houses, the Deputy must find a way to set them free before they become the next link in Bughuul's terrible chain.
The smartest aspect of Sinister II is the fact that the Deputy is seeking and destroying every house he can find that is linked to the haunting. That's an intelligent escalation of the original film's rule-setting that can be interestingly added to the narrative. The family drama works on occasion, but most of it is generic and weak. Ransone is good enough in the leading role, but he doesn't have nearly the narrative presence of Ethan Hawke's character. The possessed kid aspect of the first film's narrative takes a huge percentage of the screen time, with none of the impact that its predecessor had. While the narrative is rendered weaker by the lack of focus, the scares are also completely defanged. The 8mm snuff films of the first movie, lauded by most critics as extremely well-executed horror moments, are rendered comical by the terrible execution and sloppy escalation.
Sinister II has unquestionably killed any hope of a franchise that the first film could have started, not that that solid self-contained horror film needed a sequel to begin with. Scott Derickson's 2012 original is a fascinating lesson in world-building within a small narrative, while also being a well-crafted family drama and a scary movie. Sinister II manages to miss almost every aspect of what made the first one good while lacking any unique merits of its own. Sinister would be better remembered unattached to the sequel that bears its name.