Trailer Park: Our First Look Into Sinister 2

In which I discuss the latest movie trailers.

I haven't been shy around here about my love of horror movies nor how highly I've been anticipating Sinister 2.  It was unquestionably the best horror movie to come out in 2012 and arguably the best to come out of the 21st Century so far.  And now that we've gotten our first teaser trailer for the movie - 17 uninterrupted seconds of horrific bliss - I'm beginning to feel that my faith in it has been well-founded.  Check it out here:

Except for a few recent slip-ups, Blumhouse Productions has been the absolute pinnacle of 21st Century horror.  Sinister was a perfect example of this: a tersely structured film with a somewhat original premise, whose scares were based more on an understanding of old-school suspense than on jump scares or gore.  It featured realistic, likable characters who knew when it was time to cash out and run (even if that turned out in retrospect to be the worst move imaginable).

Remember when the highest praise I could give to a movie was the reaction of a seven-year-old that I was with?  The highest praise that I can give Sinister is similarly how it affected those around me when I showed it to them.

Becky and I showed it to a mutual friend of ours who was nearly as big a horror fan as I am.  When editing a novel that she was working on, she would have The Shining on the TV in a constant loop for inspiration.  Whenever I suggest to my friends that we take in a horror movie, she was the first to say yes.  She wasn't a genre lightweight and took the big scares like a champ.

Sinister reduced her to a terrified wreck, to the point that I felt like the world's biggest jerk for showing it to her in the first place.  We chased it with Megamind - a happy-go-lucky Dreamworks superhero movie starring Will Farrell - so that she wouldn't go to bed with visions of Baghuul dancing in her head.  When we asked her how she slept the next morning, she told us that she was still plagued by horrific nightmares throughout the night and barely slept at all.  After that, she gave up horror for well over a year, only recently returning to the genre.

Anything coming off of that kind of a reaction has some pretty big shoes to fill, but Sinister 2 seems to be taking everything in hand.  There's a new family moving into a new home that will evidently discover a new set of film reels.  Whether they're moving into the same home from the end of the first movie remains to be seen, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit if they were and we saw some familiar faces from the first movie pop in for a visit.

The most interesting addition is the trailer's voice over, which appears to be one of the children glimpsed watching the movie in the attack.  Fascinating for me, however, is how those children don't seem to be fed upon by Baghuul like the other children under his influence seemed to be, which leads me to believe that they do not belong to him in the same way that the others are: at least, not yet.

Although I only have a few short seconds to go off of, I think that I might be able to guess at what the movie's plot is, at least in part.  What if the parents aren't the ones to find the film reels, but the neighborhood children, playing in an empty home where they definitely don't belong.  They fall under Baghuul's influence, and play out his sinister games on a much wider scale: targeting all of their individual families (and the new family moving into the house) just as much as Ethan Hawke's character and his family were tormented in the first movie.

At any rate, it's something to think about, and would make for one Hell of a movie.

So what do you think is going to happen in Sinister 2?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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