If you love watching families being tortured, have I got a movie for you! In Sinister 2, a mother and twin sons move into an accursed farm house and become witness to some vintage family footage of the violently-permanent-vacation variety. The two boys (played by brothers Robert Daniel and Dartanian Sloan) begin an ongoing friendship with the resident ghosts of the house, with one boy even joining a basement film club of sorts where he watches home videos of these torture sequences with a fun gang of necrotic youngsters.
For its thematic seed, Sinister 2 builds on the horrors of the child's imagination. The film club's leader is a shadowy spirit bully named Bughuul, returning from the first Sinister to pop up as the in-house murder maestro and all-around spontaneous guy. But he's more of an occasional spook and something of a wasted character, jumping to jar us here and there while letting most the horror revolve around the spools of snuff film depicting his work.
Problem is, when you base a horror movie around a subset of horror films watched within the characters' world by otherwise unharmed children, it's not that scary. It's instead a mildly entertaining meta-commentary about our generational re-enactment of bloody recreation. We as viewers are at a layer of healthy remove from the carnage, knowing securely neither we, nor the boys, nor their undead friends are in any way at risk of dying — at least, not immediately. In its way, Sinister 2 is like a Stephen King story (like “Children of the Corn,” perhaps), more fantastical than truly frightful, and the torture scenes have a nice surreal macabre aestheticism that's, well, kind of fun.