Scott Derrickson’s Sinister arrived in October 2012 on a $3 million budget and quietly became one of the more unsettling horror films of its decade. Screenwriter C. Robert Cargill built the whole thing from a nightmare he had after watching The Ring, specifically the image of a family hanging from a tree and a mysterious film reel waiting in an attic. Blumhouse produced it. The Super 8 murder sequences were shot on actual film stock, and the Kodachrome look they achieved, those warm, oversaturated reds and yellows, was part of the point. By 2020, a scientific study measuring heart rates across fifty horror films ranked Sinister the scariest of all of them.
What makes it linger isn’t the jump scares or the mythology but the slow, specific unraveling of a man who knows he’s making a terrible decision and keeps making it anyway. Ethan Hawke plays Ellison Oswalt, a true crime writer chasing the career-defining book that got away from him a decade ago. The film is as much about ego and desperation as it is about anything supernatural, and Derrickson uses that tension carefully, letting Ellison’s rationalizations carry the horror forward just as much as whatever is lurking in the dark. What follows is a scene-by-scene breakdown of how the whole thing plays out.
A Haunted House Move-In
The film opens with a home video showing four members of a family hanging from a tree branch, ropes tied to a limb above them. When the branch holding them up gives way, it yanks them into the air and they suffocate, leaving all of them dead. The footage, it will turn out, was shot on actual Super 8 film stock, which gives it that warm, oversaturated Kodachrome look, with bright reds and yellows that make the horror of what’s happening feel even more wrong. Then we cut to Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), a true crime writer there with his wife Tracy (Juliet Rylance) and their two kids, Trevor (Michael Hall D’Addario) and Ashley (Clare Foley), clearly in the middle of moving into a new place.
Ellison has built his whole career on cases where justice was never served, unsolved mysteries and killers who were never caught. His big break was a book called Kentucky Blood, which hit number one on the New York Times Bestsellers list, but that was ten years ago, and he’s been struggling to recapture that success ever since. This time, his new project is based on a horrifying real event that happened right in this very house. He’s been keeping the whole thing secret from Tracy.
A local sheriff (Fred Thompson) shows up in the front yard and pulls Ellison aside. He strongly suggests Ellison pack up and leave. The house was the scene of a family massacre, where everyone was killed except one child, a girl named Stephanie Stevenson (Victoria Leigh), who vanished and hasn’t been found since. The sheriff’s take is that this isn’t a story that needs to be told, and it definitely doesn’t need a book written about it. But Ellison’s not budging. He heads out back to the tree where it all happened, then goes up to the attic. That’s where he finds it, an old film projector and a box of snuff films on Super 8.
Disturbing Reels Discovered
He hauls everything down to his office, pins photos of the victims on the wall, writes out his questions, starts building out the research for the book, and threads up the first reel. At first it just looks like a regular home video, a family goofing around in the backyard, warm and normal. Then it cuts without warning to the hanging scene from the opening. The label on this reel reads “Family Hanging Out ‘11.” Watching it again now, it’s clear that someone deliberately cut the branch so it would fall and pull them up, leaving all of them dead.
Ellison’s left with two questions, who made this film, and where is Stephanie? He goes outside to look at the tree, comes back in, hears footsteps, but it’s just Ashley heading to the bathroom. False alarm. He loads up the second reel, labeled “BBQ ‘79.” Another family, this time relaxing by a lake. Normal footage, until it isn’t. The video cuts to them trapped inside a car, hands bound, mouths duct-taped. Someone outside douses the car in accelerant and lights it. They burn alive. The brutality of it shakes Ellison badly, and he almost calls 911. Almost. He talks himself out of it and keeps going. He’s about to start the third reel when he hears a door. He figures Tracy’s up, but when he checks her room she’s asleep.
He heads down the hall and finds a cardboard box sitting in front of a door, with something moving inside it. He opens it and it’s Trevor. Ellison carries his son back to bed. Next morning at breakfast, Trevor has no memory of any of it. Classic sleepwalking, and it’s been an issue. Tracy takes the kids to school. Ellison goes back to the third reel. This one, labeled “Pool Party ‘66,” shows a family having a normal time at their backyard pool. Then night falls and they’re all bound to chairs at the pool’s edge. The killer methodically pushes each chair in, one by one. They drown. But Ellison catches something odd at the bottom of the pool, a strange figure lurking in the water. He pauses on it, leans in close, and then the reel burns. Right at that moment. The frame with the figure on it, destroyed.
While he’s trying to salvage the reel, he hears Tracy in the living room. She’s chewing Trevor out because he drew a picture of a tree with four people hanging from it, an exact mirror of the crime scene Ellison has been studying. Tracy is furious. Ellison tries to smooth it over. She doesn’t want to hear it. That night, Ellison gets to the fourth reel, labeled “Sleepy Time ‘98.” Family members bound in their beds. The killer goes room to room with a knife and cuts their throats, one by one. Rewatching it, Ellison spots a symbol painted on one of the bedroom doors. He prints it out and starts digging.
Pattern of Serial Murders
He finds a case from 1998, a family wiped out with every member killed except a 13-year-old boy who disappeared and was never found. Then the lights in his office cut out. He hears movement from the attic. This happens several times, with strange sounds throughout the house keeping him on edge. He finally goes up to check. When he opens a black cardboard box, there’s a snake coiled inside the lid. But there’s also something else in there, drawings. Detailed sketches of each murder from the reels. And in every single one of them, there’s a figure watching from a distance. The same figure in each scene. Mr. Boogie.
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Then Ellison falls through the attic floor and wrenches his leg. Two deputies show up to help him out. Turns out one of them, credited simply as Deputy So & So (James Ransone), is a huge fan of Ellison’s work and offers to help with the research, tracking down addresses and pulling case files. Ellison takes him up on it. Going back over the drawings and photos, Ellison realizes that figure, Mr. Boogie, was at every scene. Always there, always watching from just far enough away. He prints out a still of the figure and pins it up.
The deputy calls back with what he’s found, revealing that the murders took place in different cities at different times, stretching all the way back to the 1960s. The pattern is there, as every family that was killed had previously lived at the site of the prior murder, and in each case, one child from the family vanished and was never found. Each victim family had also been drugged before being killed, which explains why no one fought back. Then, without Ellison noticing, the printed image of Mr. Boogie moves on its own.
Reviewing footage he shot in the attic, Ellison sees little hands reaching for him in the dark. He’s officially scared now. He decides to call it a night. But he wakes up to the projector running by itself in his office. He goes in, zooms into a frame, and gets a clear capture of Mr. Boogie. He figures out the location where the figure appeared and goes there in the yard, where Mr. Boogie is standing right in front of him. Then gone, just leaves rustling. But it’s Trevor, wandering around outside. Ellison takes him back to bed, grabs his baseball bat and flashlight on his way out, and nearly jumps out of his skin when a large dog appears in his path. The dog bolts in terror, because behind Ellison, there are children’s ghosts.
Tracy has had enough. Something is wrong with Trevor, something is wrong with this whole situation, and she wants out now. Ellison refuses again. This book, he tells her, is going to be the best thing he’s ever written. He asks her to hold on a little longer. The next day the deputy brings over more case files. Ellison shows him the symbol from the reel. The deputy tells him to reach out to a professor named Jonas (Vincent D’Onofrio) who can explain it. That night, Ellison watches the fifth reel, “Lawn Work ‘86.” Someone sneaks into a family home through a side door, grabs a lawnmower from the garage, and uses it to kill everyone in the house.
Bughuul’s Ancient Evil Revealed
Professor Jonas emails back. The symbol is connected to an ancient deity, one that goes all the way back to Babylonian times. The name is Bughuul, the Eater of Children. Bughuul needs children’s souls to survive, trapping them and pulling them into his world. The cult devoted to him sacrifices children’s blood to keep him fed. Jonas suspects the murders are ritualistic cult initiations rather than the work of a single killer, though Ellison is starting to think the truth is something stranger. That night Ellison wakes up again to the projector. He kills it, grabs the bat, and starts walking through the house.
He doesn’t see the ghost of a little girl standing right behind him at the kitchen table. He can feel something near him but can’t see it. He locks every door and window and checks on the kids. What he doesn’t know is that Ashley is sitting frozen in her room, staring at the girl’s ghost standing across from her. Tracy calls him out of his office, where Ashley has been painting on the wall outside her bedroom. It’s a portrait of Stephanie Stevenson. Ashley says, matter-of-factly, that Stephanie is dead. That lands hard.
Ellison and Tracy get into it again. Tracy begs him one more time to leave. That night a light wakes Ellison up and the projector is running somewhere in the house. He searches for it and looks up at the attic ladder, realizing someone was just up there. He climbs up and finds the missing children’s ghosts gathered together, watching the projector. They appear in various states of decay, as Bughuul has been consuming their souls slowly, and the five children visible here are what’s left of his most recent victims, while the older ones are simply gone. They all slowly turn and look at him. One of them puts a finger to their lips.
Ellison grabs the projector and all the reels and burns everything in the backyard. Tracy comes out. He apologizes. Really apologizes. They pack up the kids and they’re gone. On the road, they get pulled over by the same sheriff from the beginning of the film, the one who first told Ellison to leave. Ellison tells him he’s finally taking his advice, that he should’ve done it from day one, and swears he’s done writing books like this. For good. They move back to their old house and start putting life back together.
No Escape From Bughuul
That night, Professor Jonas calls Ellison back and sends over more material, specifically ancient sketches of Bughuul from the Dark Ages, each one partially destroyed because ancient cultures believed that Bughuul literally lived inside images, which acted as portals between his realm and the mortal world. Looking at them lets Bughuul in, and he either possesses the viewer or pulls them physically into the image. Kids are the most vulnerable. Ellison asks Jonas point-blank whether destroying everything connected to Bughuul closes the gateway. Jonas is baffled. He asks what kind of book Ellison is actually writing. Ellison hangs up without answering.
Ellison deletes the files Jonas sent, ignores a call from the deputy, and goes up to the attic to put away his boxes, where he stops cold. The projector is there. All the reels he burned are back. Inside the box, there’s an envelope with a reel he’s never seen. He brings it down to his office and reassembles the reel. On his desk, there’s a drink waiting for him, along with a note from Ashley reading “Good night.” The deputy calls again. This time Ellison answers. The deputy tells him he’s been trying to reach him with something critical, which is that every family that became a victim in this pattern had previously lived at the site of the most recent killing. The last killing happened in 1998 at Ellison’s previous house, the house they just moved back to. Ellison’s family is next.
On the screen, the restored footage plays. Stephanie and the other missing children are there, watching their own families die. The truth comes out, as it was the children who killed their families, all of them, under Bughuul’s influence. Bughuul doesn’t kill directly. Instead, he possesses a child, has them do it, then takes them into his world to feed on their soul. The whole chain of killings, every snuff film and every missing child, has been Bughuul farming victims across decades. Then Ellison’s head starts spinning. Ashley drugged the drink. He goes down. Ashley stands over him and tells him she loves it when he makes the movie longer.
Ellison wakes up bound and gagged alongside Tracy and Trevor. Ashley walks in with an ax. She films it herself, killing both her parents and her brother. Before she does, she tells her father he’s going to be famous again. Afterward, she paints a sketch of what she did on the walls, rendering images of cats, dogs, and unicorns in her family’s blood, consistent with her reputation throughout the film as a gifted artist. She stands and watches the footage of all the other children who came before her. They tilt their heads to the left, and Ashley does the same. Bughuul is standing right behind her. When the children in the video disappear, Bughuul takes Ashley with him. A new film has been made. The box of reels is left behind for whoever moves in next. Title: “House Painting ‘12.”
